From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxi!mhuxj!mhuxv!burl!sb1!ll1!ihldt!ixn5c!ihuxr!lew
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Title: Re: Wayne Christopher's "shaggy dog" story
Article-I.D.: ihuxr.292
Posted: Wed Jan 19 20:31:46 1983
Received: Mon Jan 24 08:51:38 1983
Reply-To: lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.)

Wayne Christopher's evangelical "shaggy dog" story reminds me of
a short story titled "The Saint" by V. S. Pritchett. This story
involves the same (I believe) ape, but the story is anti-religious.
It can be found in "50 Great Short Stories", which was a high school
staple in the sixties.

The first line of the story is "When I was seventeen years old I lost
my religious faith." The reason why hinges on an incident involving
a visit to his family by a Mr. Timberlake, who was a sort of travelling
minister of the "Church of Purification" to which the family belonged.
A major tenet of the church was the unreality of evil, and indeed of
unpleasant circumstances of any sort. The ape is introduced with this
paragraph:

"Then I do not know how or why, I began to see a difficulty. Without
warning and as if I had gone into my bedroom at night and had found a
gross ape seated in my bed and thereafter following me about with his
grunts and his fleas and a look, relentless and ancient, scored on his
brown face, I was faced with the problem which prowls at the center of
all religious faith. I was faced with the problem of the origin of evil.
Evil was an illusion, we were taught. But even illusions have an origin.
The Purifiers denied this."

Mr. Timberlake turns out to have feet of clay, of course, and the story
closes with the lines:

" ... I understood why he did not talk to me about the origin of evil.
He was honest. The ape was with us. The ape that merely followed me was
already inside Mr. Timberlake eating out his heart."

Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew