Free The Temple by Brian Smith

daughter. Is that right?”
    “Yes,” she said looking
astounded while gasps and some applause could be heard.
    “A very sickly little girl,”
Jeremiah added.
    Alice Hopkins put her hands on
her mouth. “Oh my God, how do you know that? I haven’t told anyone
here.”
    “The ways of the Lord are
mysterious, Alice. You’re asking yourself why your little girl is
suffering from cancer. You’re asking why you keep fighting and
taking her to doctors who can’t help her. Now Alice, I’m a man of
my word and I won’t be making you any false promises or give false
hope like some would. But I can invite you to join us in our
temple, bring your girl and now here’s something I will promise. I
promise that we will pray for her, we’ll beg the Lord for mercy;
and who knows, miracles have happened before, Alice.”
    “Thank you so much,” Alice said
with tears running down her face.
    There was loud applause from the
audience while TV audiences were invited to help by making a
donation. Bank details appeared on the screen.
    For the next hours Master
Jeremiah took question after question. The audience were amazed how
he invariably knew who he was talking to, how he knew about
people’s problems and lives. In the end there wasn’t a soul,
including journalists, who wasn’t convinced that he had special
powers, a gift from the Lord, or that a miracle had occurred. The
audience was in ecstasy and it was a jubilant and triumphant Master
Jeremiah who finished the event. All the while donations from
around the country kept pouring in from many good folks who wanted
to be part of the Lord’s miracle and do their bit to help Master
Jeremiah in his mission. There were some large donations from the
wealthy and many smaller ones from people like Ruth Sanders. She
had spent forty-five years working as a nurse and now lived in
retirement on a meagre pension that barely enabled her to get by.
She donated half a month’s pension even though she didn’t know how
she would manage on the little that was left for her. “I’ll just
have to eat less,” she said. “What a wonderful man Master Jeremiah
is, helping all those poor people. It just shows that there are
still good hearts, even in our day and age.”
    At the end of the event Jeremiah
went backstage and removed the earpiece with which he had received
all the necessary information about the people asking questions.
One of the brethren, Brother James, had watched the hall from
hidden cameras. When someone asked a question he cross-referenced
the seat with the information that person had given when buying the
entrance ticket. With the help of networking sites he found a lot
of private information that enabled Master Jeremiah to deceive the
whole country into believing that he had special powers from
God.
    He rubbed his ear and yawned.
“What a load of gormless sheep,” he muttered. “No wonder they need
a good shepherd like me to guide them in their lives. And what more
could sheep hope for than to be fleeced.”

The
Museum
     
    The just man is most free from
disturbance,
    while the unjust is full of the
utmost disturbance.
    Epicurus
     
    Master Jeremiah was ecstatic
with the results of the nationwide TV broadcast. In one night the
temple earned millions. In fact they received more money than
during the entire previous existence of the temple, at least as
long as he had been there. He looked around his confined quarters
and shook his head in disgust. “That won’t do,” he said. “That
won’t do at all. How ever did I manage to live in this dingy little
room for so many years? It’s almost Spartan, and most certainly not
becoming of a person in my station.”
    With no one to oversee the
temple’s finances Jeremiah had no problem solving such little
personal problems and not long after he was the proud owner of a
luxurious mansion that used to belong to a factory owner. The
abandoned factory building came with the mansion and Jeremiah
immediately saw how he could put it