God gave me this task:“I have made you the examiner of my people,to examine and weigh their lives.They’re a thickheaded, hard-nosed bunch,rotten to the core, the lot of them.Refining fires are cranked up to white heat,but the ore stays a lump, unchanged.It’s useless to keep trying any longer.Nothing can refine evil out of them.Men will give up and call them ‘slag,’thrown on the slag heap by me, their God.”