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Penguin Island by Anatole France
page 25 of 306 (08%)
"And worthy of the creator of the world," answered the pontiffs.

"It is," resumed the Lord, "a manner of speaking in accordance with
my old cosmogony and one which I cannot give up without losing my
immutability. . . .

"After the sun, then, will have turned another two hundred and forty
times round the earth, there will not be a single cleric left in Rome
who knows Latin. When they sing their litanies in the churches people
will invoke Orichel, Roguel, and Totichel, and, as you know, these are
devils and not angels. Many robbers desiring to make their communions,
but fearing that before obtaining pardon they would be forced to give up
the things they had robbed to the Church, will make their confessions
to travelling priests, who, ignorant of both Italian and Latin, and only
speaking the patois of their village, will go through cities and towns
selling the remission of sins for a base price, often for a bottle of
wine. Probably we shall not be inconvenienced by those absolutions as
they will want contrition to make them valid, but it may be that their
baptisms will cause us some embarrassment. The priests will become so
ignorant that they will baptize children in nomine patria et filia et
spirita sancta, as Louis de Potter will take a pleasure in relating in
the third volume of his 'Philosophical, Political, and Critical History
of Christianity.' It will be an arduous question to decide on the
validity of such baptisms; for even if in my sacred writings I tolerate
a Greek less elegant than Plato's and a scarcely Ciceronian Latin, I
cannot possibly admit a piece of pure patois as a liturgical formula.
And one shudders when one thinks that millions of new-born babes will be
baptized by this method. But let us return to our penguins."

"Your divine words, Lord, have already led us back to them," said
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