Letter #4

Fidi, my dearest Fidi,

We have been over this before. You are a sesquipedalian, and I am not impressed by it. It makes your letters a laborious read. Cease this infernal practice at once or I will no longer mentor you.

Now, onto the matter at hand, my young protege. You have failed. The seed has been sown.

True enough, the Church hardly convicted him of anything. But your success pales in comparison to your failure. I told you he is looking for profound truth, and some of what the minister said struck a cord with him. In your report you explicitly said you were familiar with his reading habits. Have you not noticed that his reading, mythology, classic literature, and the like, is rife with truth hidden in story and allegory? How dare you make such a fundamental mistake!

Now, it is in the back of his mind that there are truths to be gleaned in Christianity. His curiosity is piqued. Of course, to our benefit, it hasn't even entered his mind to become a Christian and to look for Him. At present, he is only interested in cliches, maxims, and precepts that ring of truth and that stimulate his intellect. He does not realize that truth is a person yet.

This is what you must avoid.

Now for most people, this is easily accomplished. Keep him occupied and full of anxiety from life, school, and work. Teach him that material acquisition and security is priority one. The stress from his job will assist more than anything else, for your patient is of the mind where he cannot leave work at work. He carries the stress of it with him even in his time off. This will be of a tremendous benefit, for it will leave him weary, and it will leave his relations who desire his attention and companionship frustrated, thus compounding the stress. This will paralyze his ability to think about truth at all, and he will only imagine that if there is a person behind our reality, he must be cruel and malevolent indeed. If the day ever comes where Christian business owners realize that a stress free environment accommodates their "Gospel", the inflow of souls into Hell will diminish, and we fallen ones will no longer be able to slake our lusts. Until that day, employers, Christian or not, remain one of our greatest allies.

School will also be of use. The subject at hand will ultimately prove useless, worry yourself not about that. But his school friends will boggle his mind with conflicting ideas about life's ethical behavior. Matters not what the ethic is. The more, the better. Confusion is the prescription.

I have pressing matters, so I must go now, Fidi, but I will offer one last piece of advice. If he reads the Bible at all in search for truth, let him associate what he reads with the stories he heard in church as a child. Never let him see the real story. Let them ring of a pedantic nostalgia of a bygone stage in his life. Let him think of these as children's stories, and let him not think of the Scriptures as words written for thinking adults. Tell him to file it away as fantasy, and nothing more. Never let it enter his mind that all these scenes of God crashing into the world, are designed to point to Him, that they testify of Him, and that their purpose is to lead him closer to the Him, and ultimately into His embrace.

Remember Fidi, the further the sheep is from the shepherd, the easier it is to prey upon. Every step toward the shepherd multiplies our difficulty.

I hope your next letter is accompanied by an hors d'oeuvre. I am longing to have a taste of your patient to whet my appetite. Just a morsel will do, at present.

Your emaciated guest,
Count Apateó̱n