Taylor Caldwell

But evil is madness and has no pity, and therefore it is confusion thrice compounded. Evil men possess no wits. They are easily led to believe what they wish to believe,

We are too Advanced for myths; we have achieved maturity and wisdom and intellect. Begone with Myths! They are the lumber of dead yesterdays, the rubble of a primitive people, the legends of our racial childhood. There is only Today, and we are that Day. There is but one God, and His Name is Mankind, and science is His prophet

Is there no way to appeal to your pity, though you have vowed that you will have no pity towards men? Consider again Terra, third from a certain star (a dwarf yellow sun, that little guardian of nine infinitesimal worlds, that feeble dim spark in the mighty Galaxy which I rule, a Galaxy of enormous suns, too many even for my own counting, and whose numbers are known only to God). Why, of all the billions of planets in Creation did God choose to be born of Terra, a hesitant, trembling flash of blue, a darkling little spot, an unseen tiny glimmer in a whirlwind of planets, whose name is not known to the children of mighty distant worlds in other universes? You have asked that with wrath and fury, many thousands of times. I have no answer for you. Our Father made Terra’s soil sacred with His Holy Blood, which He shed for that world, and for all its souls. We have never understood, for this He has not done before. He chose the smallest and the weakest, the frailest and meanest, the most insignificant, the most obscure and shrouded, the most crepuscular, the most hidden, the most tremulous, the most unsound and uncertain, the most fragile and coldest, the least endowed with the reflected beauty of Heaven. On this barren and ignominious spot He laid down His human life in agony, and it astounded not only you, but your brothers also. You alone questioned, and turned away in disgust, and then your anger was aroused beyond what it had ever been aroused before. You have tempted uncountable worlds to their death in the past, but never were you so affronted before by any world, and never did you vow so pitilessly to destroy it. Its creatures were no match for you, Lucifer, yet you have no pity.

To denigrate him as a ridiculous figure, and ugly and paltry, is wrong, and does a disservice to God Who can create nothing ugly—only man can do that—and in the belittling of Lucifer there is a great danger. Evil is nothing to belittle, nor the anguish of Evil.

What has virtue to offer in comparison, though virtue is eternal life? Does virtue possess the drama, the violence, the color, the frantic vehemence, the terrible euphoria, the laughter and noise and ecstasies of evil, and yes, the enormous capacity for destruction? Verily, it does not. It is a weariness to man, as You have regretfully observed ten thousand times ten thousand millennia over and over. The desire for wickedness and death is far greater in the breasts of mankind than the desire for innocence and life.

Eight billion

Did He know that you would transgress beyond the boundary that must not be crossed, which is the greatest of sins? We shall never know. Love can destroy as well as evil, and if you were cast from Heaven it was not because of your evil but through your haughty love.

Endless other worlds have sinned and fallen, under my tutelage and suggestion, beautiful vast worlds of blinding color and enormous vistas and splendid cities, and with men who could at least claim to have a wink of intelligence. But He did not choose one of them. He chose the most vulgar, the most animalistic, the muddiest, the dirtiest, the most inarticulate, the least endowed with poetry and comprehension, without mercy and faith and learning. It is not worthy even to be called a latrine or a gutter, this murderer of prophets and heroes, this murderer of God, Himself. This delighter in filth, in sins most abominable and unspeakable, this arrogant little squeak in the song of creation! I have felt some pity for other worlds which have fallen, for they had some splendor and some glory. But for Terra I have only revulsion. Half desert, half storm, half-polluted seas, half-eroded mountains, it is a fit habitation of the creature which reared itself on its hind legs and dared to call itself a man!

But virtue is simple and easily understood. It is only evil that is complex, complicated, twisted in all its ways, and devious. Virtue is a stream of bright water going faithfully to the sea. But evil winds through many passages and gorges and chasms, and it takes on many intricate colors and hides itself in alien caverns.

When God “condemned” man to work He bestowed the next holiest gift after free will. Labor is prayer and achievement, and the uncertainty of the achievement. Beauty is always in the process of becoming, but is never fully attained. Joy is in the next turning, but the next turning promises greater joy. Love is never completely satisfied in Heaven, except for the surety of the Love of God. It strains forever, and happily, after greater fulfillments.

where there is no need there is no desire and no enjoyment