The Power and the Glory: "The roof couldn't keep out this rain." (p. 152) "Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair." -Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory" (p. 141) In Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, setting is essential in understanding the spiritual conquest of the main character. The story takes place in post-revolution Mexico of the nineteen-thirties, where Catholicism has been banned. The government has shut down all of the churches and established anti-Catholic laws, jealous of the rising power of the church, and nervous of the corrupt ways in which the church has been dealing with