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FOR THE GLORY OF GOD by Helen Norris Kirkus Star

FOR THE GLORY OF GOD

By

Publisher: Macmillan

This is a story, poetic in its simplicity, which is highly reminiscent of Miles Connolly's Mr. Blue in its telling of youth and innocence in the service of God. It begins ""This is a story of Carl who was not like any other boy because no boy is ever like another"". Later Carl, at 19, a seminarian, was sent by his bishop to replace the Rev. Mr. Massey in a small village -- a village, however, which had a cathedral, in miniature, on a mountain top. But the cathedral had no congregation because it was built by Grover Kane, a vicious man, who in his final days, had tried to bargain for eternity with God by offering a cathedral ""For the Glory of God"" --an offering which was vitiated, so the village people felt, by the man's life. Carl was young and thought it was his youth which kept the people away. And he was ready to give up his pride in his youth if it was experience they wanted. But Mr. Massey, before him, was an old man and he had thought the church needed a young man -- a man who could understand the ways of the village. Miles Stoner told Carl the story of Kane and how the cathedral was built. Stoner would have Carl to Sunday dinner but he wouldn't come to the church because God wasn't there. But Carl knew that the church needed only one other -- ""wherever two or three gather in My Name..."" -- and Stoner, reluctantly in the beginning, became that first other through the wisdom and simplicity of a child. A brief, beautiful tale told with delicacy and sensibility.