Mike Takes Over Foster’s Work

Mike Takes Over Foster’s Work is the closing action of the novel: Reverend Foster announces that he will be away for eons, introduces Mike as his successor, and leaves him responsible for the studio and its work. The handover turns the book’s final image from the fate of humanity into a practical succession, with Mike pushing back his halo and already considering changes.

Foster’s Institution and Its Methods

Foster’s departure matters because he leaves behind more than a congregation. The Church of the New Revelation had been shaped to answer the tensions of American religious culture, where puritanical public standards coexisted with intense private interest in sex. Foster’s magnetic authority and instinct for the culture’s appetites helped him build a movement that presented itself as a return to primitive Christianity while borrowing organizational methods from freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, and advertising.

The church’s structure distinguished between public participation and inner authority. An outer church welcomed seekers, who could receive benefits without advancing; a middle church gathered the saved, whose membership tied religious belonging to tithes, business connections, and a celebratory culture of happiness. Beyond these visible layers stood the unnamed Inner Church: its reborn members held leadership posts, controlled keys and records, set policy, and alone qualified for direct admission to Heaven. Foster selected this inner circle with care, and, as the organization grew, had to relinquish his personal role in choosing every member.

The institution also knew how to respond when challenged. Fosterites from other places could converge on a community attempting to suppress the movement, while the church’s legal strategy made prosecutions difficult to sustain. This combination of disciplined organization, public appeal, and resistance to suppression forms the inheritance behind the final transfer: Mike receives a religious enterprise already built to expand and endure opposition.

The Handover

The final scene begins with Foster telling his assistant, Digby, that he will be gone for a few eons on a special assignment. He then presents Mike as the new supervisor. Digby knows the studio and, in Foster’s estimation, will make a steady foreman for whatever Mike conceives, so the succession includes both authority over the work and an experienced aide familiar with its operations.

Mike greets Digby as someone he may have met before, though Digby does not remember him. The exchange passes quickly into their shared religious formula, which Foster interrupts as a formality: he accepts the idea that each person is God but insists that this is true of everyone. The moment gives the transfer its characteristic balance. Mike and Digby affirm a spiritual equality, while Foster still handles the practical business of assigning responsibilities and urging them to get on with the work.

Foster’s instruction that there is no eternity to waste is pointedly set against his announced absence of eons. He leaves not because the assignment is complete, but because it now belongs to someone else. Mike accepts the post without ceremony, pushes back his halo, and begins thinking about changes he wants to make. The novel ends before those changes are specified or carried out; the decisive consequence is the opening of a new phase under Mike’s direction.

Continuity and Change

The succession links the two religious projects without making them identical. Foster’s church had turned charismatic leadership into a durable organization, with layers of access, designated offices, trained members, and methods for surviving opposition. Mike’s own Church of All Worlds likewise develops circles of instruction, ritual, and leadership. At its meetings, Mike uses his reputation as the Man from Mars and performs apparent miracles, while assessing potential members and directing suitable candidates toward further training. These details make the new appointment part of a wider pattern: religious authority is not only personal inspiration but also the work of selecting, teaching, and organizing followers.

Yet the closing scene emphasizes that Mike intends to alter what he inherits. Foster names him supervisor of the studio and leaves him its work; Mike immediately sees changes to make. The unfinished dash at the end does not disclose a program, and the article cannot specify what he would change. It does, however, make succession active rather than merely ceremonial: the institution continues, but its new leader is already looking beyond the arrangement he has received.

Ending and Significance

Before this handover, the narrative frames the distant prospect of the Old Ones judging Earth. They are not omniscient, and their own provincial standards may lead them to identify humanity’s restless, quarrelsome complexity as an incurable wrongness that ought to be removed. The text nevertheless judges destruction increasingly unlikely by the time the Old Ones might act. Against that vast, uncertain future, the final scene narrows to a studio, a departing supervisor, an assistant, and a new assignment.

Foster’s exit makes the ending both expansive and deliberately unfinished. He leaves to undertake work measured in eons; Mike inherits a practical role and begins to imagine revisions. The handover therefore closes the novel not with a settled institutional order or a completed cosmic verdict, but with continuity under new leadership and work still to be done.