The Devil and Tom Walker

But as my friend the Deacon says, when you start out to chase the Devil to his lair, you don't know just where you are going to wind up the chase. The Deacon is a coon hunter, and he says when the hounds are on the trail you may find yourself staring into the eyes of a fighter. In my case, I wound up staring into the cold blue eyes of President Thomas Fenton Walker and thinking: The Devil and Tom Walker!

And eight thousand miles and a thought world away, I was looking into the hypnotic black stare of Abdul Abdullah Mohammed. And I was thinking the same thought, but I would have to invent my own phrase for it. But no. The cartoonist for the Courier Journal had already invented one for me. Abdul's caricature in an aggressive pose, with the caption: "Satan has one son too."

So two Presidents. Tom Walker and Abdul Abdullah. Both driven to greatness by personal ambition and political opportunity. The two rising simultaneously to places of great power. One in the West, the other in the East. Both destined to the struggle for the nerve center of the world.

But I have to tell you how I became involved in this struggle for the soul of the world. How I, John James McDougald, known to my few intimates as Jay Jay, out of Earth's population of billions of people who contend daily with the Devil, came to be the man in the middle between Tom Walker and Abdul Abdullah Mohammed, until the struggle had moved to heights I could not ascend, and to depths I could not plumb, and I was left as an observer of events out of control. But seeing, hearing, both Tom Walker and Abdul speak with the tongue of righteousness, of divine mission, God's own elect, to the peoples of the world, cringing, fawning, worshipping at their feet, and asking myself What am I doing in this high drama of War between the Princes of Light and Darkness?

I, Jay Jay, am too old to be caught up in the roar of War's guns. What has an old greybeard to do with chasing the Devil through flaming fields where men are dying like flies? How can my little county seat town in Kentucky be a viewing stage for events that are shaking and shaping the world? But it is my War Story. I have to tell it the way I saw it. Here it is.

I am a theologian. Not a saint. My old cronies down at the Sunrise Cafe will tell you Jay Jay is no saint! Not even a preacher. Oh, I was asked to preach at the Goshen Baptist Church once. Goshen is located out in the hills and has thirty seven members. "We want you to come and fill the pulpit" is the way Deacon Harold Snodgrass put it to me. I was startled and asked why me, and Harold said "Well, it's like this. Hit don't take much preachin' fer us out there at Goshen and we thought you'd be jest the man to fill the bill."

I accepted the honor and declined the offer and went back to my studies at the University because at that stage of my youthfulness I considered myself a scholar, and theology became almost an obsessive interest with me. Theology is what people think they know about God, which is a lot more than they do know about Him. That doesn't hinder most of us in our studies though, and there is a whole metaphysical science of theology which has been going on since the beginning of time. The oldest theology is mythology which is what people long ago and far away believed, while theology is what people here and now believe. In actual practice there is not as much difference as the average respectable member of the First Baptist Church of Scarrsville Kentucky would like to believe there is.