Dom Paulo often marveled that the wooden Leibowitz had also proved resistant to several centuries of his predecessors-marveled because of the saint’s most peculiar smile. That little grin will ruin you someday, he warned the image... Surely, the saints must laugh in Heaven; the Psalmist says that God Himself shall chortle, but Abbot Malmeddy must have disapproved-God rest his soul. That solemn ass. How did you get by him, I wonder? You’re not sanctimonious enough for some. That smile- Who do I know that grins that way? I like it, but... Someday, another grim dog will sit in this chair. Cave canem. He’ll replace you with a plaster Leibowitz. Long-suffering. One who doesn’t look crosseyed at flies. Then you’ll be eaten by termites down in the storage room. To survive the Church’s slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets a turn of the sifter-handle now and then-when some new prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters, "Some of this garbage has got to go." The sifter was usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then, usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be prettifiers.