Now the missionaries are left with the problem of how to remedy such a sin. To solve this, they looked at how the church has always solved this problem. When the church encounters people with new sins, the church teaches these people about Christ, who had in His turn, showed them Truth. For the church, Christ took the abstract concepts of Truth and Virtue and gave them tangible form, and in doing so led His followers to salvation. Since the duty of the Church is to spread the teachings of Christ, they have tried to give every new culture that had previously been living in sin and show them Christ in the context of their culture. As Father Peregrine states: "What sort of Christ do Christian Chinese worship? An Oriental Christ, naturally." (137). So, it seemed only fitting to Father Peregrine that the image of Christ would be a blue sphere, like the image the old Martians took. Armed with this new version of Christ, the missionaries attempt to feed the Martians Truth as the Church understands it, corporeal truth, the worldly truth of the here and now.
Instead, the old Martians were able to teach the missionaries about Truth. The Old Martians gave up their bodies and all the ills that go along with it to live in a state of happiness and pure Beauty, reminiscent of the moments of Beauty that Father Peregrine had experienced in his childhood on Independence Day. These bodiless beings had found absolute Truth without the aid of the form of Christ that the priests wanted to give them. The Martians had " put away the sins of the body and live in God's grace." (140). In doing so, they became immortal, and timelessly Beautiful, like the Independence Day fire balloons, in which Father Peregrine saw " the dim faces of dear relatives long dead mantled with moss." (128). Just as the faces of the dead had been preserved in the Beauty of the fire balloons, so had the souls of the old Martians been preserved in their new form of pure Beauty, once they reached the state of pure Virtue and Truth.
