Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Above a small English village, a great Gothic church rises from Bohun Beacon. Its curate, the Rev. Wilfred Bohun, lives among stone galleries, a village forge, the Blue Boar inn, and neighbours whose habits seem as fixed as the road to Greenford.

When Wilfred's flamboyant brother returns at daybreak, an old family tension enters the quiet landscape. Soon the village is confronted by an impossible violence and a little hammer whose scale does not fit the force it appears to have delivered.

First published in 1910, "The Hammer of God" is the ninth Father Brown story. Chesterton turns height, perspective, and certainty into a moral puzzle about what people fail to see when they look only at the ground before them.