5th March
It was midnight when the Reverend Leadbetter regained consciousness.
His head hurt due to its impact with the floor.
He painfully rose to his feet and began to walk unsteadily towards the washroom.
Suddenly, he recalled the earlier events.
His complex cocktail of feelings translated to a sound from his vocal chords which a casual observer might have confused with that of a werewolf on the night of a full moon.
~*~*~*~*~
Belief is a very useful survival characteristic.
Our far distant, pre-historic ancestors may have learned that a narrow, brown, curved object could be a harmless stick or a venomous snake.
Those who feared all such objects and avoided them would survive. Those with a Dawkinesque bent of mind might poke every such object with a finger to empirically test its deadly potential. Such pioneers would rapidly become extinct.
Questioning the status quo, however, also has a survival advantage. The Earth is neither flat nor at the centre of the universe, but if brave, thoughtful individuals had not been prepared to promote that position, we would still reside in the Dark Ages.
Natural selection has thus maintained, even though to these scientifically enlightened days, a spectrum of human susceptibility to belief.
At one end of this spectrum stand those who hold rigid and unshakable beliefs in whatever nature or nurture has associated for them with the most positive emotions. At the opposite end of the spectrum stand those of a scientific persuasion who will grudgingly accept something to be likely if it keeps producing replicable, confirmatory results despite their unrelenting quests to disprove it.
Christian Leadbetter was decisively located many miles along the road towards the unquestioning end of the belief spectrum.
It seemed certain to him that the universe had been created by God in seven days.
It seemed certain that his fundamentalist interpretations of biblical teaching were true.
Despite the jeers of the cynics, what was wrong with the calculations of Dr. John Lightfoot in 1642 that man was created at nine o’clock in the morning on Sunday the twelfth of September in the year 3928 BC?
All that was required of him was to maintain and defend his beliefs, and God would have a place for him in Heaven.
Earlier that night he had failed his God, and more disturbingly, his God had failed him. His faith had been unable to defend him from the cardinal sins of lust and envy.
Emotionally, he had been drawn to the cruel and heinous behaviours of the ‘High Priest of the Book’, Swan Morrison.
Furthermore, Leadbetter had concluded that Morrison might well be more powerful than any individual he knew within the hierarchy of the Church. Morrison, if he had learned the skills described in the texts recovered by Sam Collins, could accurately predict the future.
Perhaps Swan Morrison’s path was the true path.
But what did this mean for everything he had previously and fervently believed?
These conflicting perspectives and emotions were more than the vicar was mentally competent to process. When the police broke into the church, they found him sitting in a foetal position on the floor of his office: he was rocking back and forth, sobbing and unable to communicate.