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And so, he informed himself, by means of a project engineered by the guile and ambitions of the Servants of Wrath themselves, we Christians, evidently defeated, have triumphed; this portrait has initiated a process of perishing for him, by its very authenticity—or rather the fact that the Servants of Wrath will insist on its authenticity, collaborating in their own downfall. Thus the True God uses evil to refine the good, and good to refine evil,, which is to say, in the final analysis we discover that God Himself has been served by everyone. By every event, whether good or bad.
I mean, he thought, labeled good or bad. Good or bad, truth or error, the wrong road or the right road, ignorance and malice and wisdom and love… they are, he thought, to be viewed as, Omniae vitae ad Deum ducent. All lives, like all roads, lead—not to Rome, but to God.
Walking on now, he reflected that he should put this in a sermon along with his pun; it was something to tell people, to make them smile as those resting persons by the ruins of the old U. S. Post Office substation had smiled. Even if they did not understand thoughts so complex, they could still take pleasure in them.
To enjoy things again… the world’s oppression, vanquished by an act invisible to everyone, could not hold men back; they could bask and smile and unbutton their shirts to catch the sun and enjoy the humor of a simple priest.
I would like to know what did happen, he thought. But God occludes men to fulfill His will.
Maybe, Dr. Abernathy decided, it is better that way.
Firmly gripping his basket of string beans and beets, he continued on in the direction of Charlottesville and his little church.
Nineteen
The murch which Tibor McMasters painted did slowly become known throughout the world and was at last rated as equal to the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, most of which were known in the form of prints, the originals having been destroyed.
Seventeen years after Tiber’s death, an official pronouncement of authentication was made by the Servants of Wrath hierarchy. It was indeed the visage of the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel. There could be no doubt. Any disputing this was henceforth illegal and carried a penalty of emasculation for men, one ear removed for women. This was to insure reverence in an irreverent world, faith in a society which had become faithless, and belief in a world which had already discovered that most of what it believed were in actuality lies.
At the time of his death, Tibor was subsisting on a small a
It was said that among his effects were certain diary-like entries he had jotted down from time to time, in which, to himself alone, he had expressed toward the end certain reservations as to the authenticity of his own great murch. However, no one saw such personal holographs. If they existed at all, the Servants of Wrath who sequestered his corpus of papers either filed them away behind locked metal doors or, more likely, destroyed them.
His last two cows were killed and stuffed and placed, one on each side of his great murch, to gaze solemnly—and glassily—at the tourists who came to pay homage to the renowned painting. Tibor McMasters himself was finally made a saint of the Church. His grave site is unknown. Several cities proudly claim it.