“But would he have figured that out for himself?”
“Possibly,” said Mike, “but I doubt it. He was told that I was an angel—literally.”
“Let me see that book,” she said, taking The Christian Religion and Symbolic Logic from Mike’s hand. She opened it to the center. “I didn’t know anyone had done this sort of work,” she said.
“Oh, there was a great fuss over the book when it came out. There were those who said that the millennium had arrived because the truth of the Christian faith had been proved mathematically, and therefore all rational people would have to accept it.”
She leafed through the book. “I’ll bet there are still some who still believe that, just like there are some people who still think Euclidian geometry must necessarily be true because it can be ‘proved’ mathematically.”
Mike nodded. “All Bishop Costin did—all he was trying to do—was to prove that the axioms of the Christian faith are logically self-consistent. That’s all he ever claimed to have done, and he did a brilliant job of it.”
“But—how do you know this is what Snookums was given?”
“Look at the pages. Snookums’ waldo fingers wrinkled the pages that way. Those aren’t the marks of human fingers. Only two of Mellon’s other books were wrinkled that way.”
She jerked her head up from the book, startled. “What? This is Lew Mellon’s book?”
“That’s right. So are the other two. A Bible and a theological dictionary. They’re wrinkled the same way.”