In Greene's novel The Power and the Glory, the worldly whisky priest is on the run from the remorseless lieutenant.

But the priest and the lieutenant are not straightforward opposites: Greene is skilful in the use of verbal parallels to sketch links between the two. The ambiguous simile of "a black question mark" (p.15) or "a little dark menacing question mark" (p.35) is associated with the whisky priest and the lieutenant respectively. They are both depicted using seemingly self-contradictory phrases: the whisky priest is described as having a "round and hollow face" (p.9), and the lieutenant as a "little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love" (p.58).

But mere wordplay is not the only link between the two characters. There are parallels of experience and emotion too: at the end of Part One, the lieutenant`s impersonal ideals are suddenly tempered by a intimately personal love for the boy Luis, who represents the children whose future he pins his hopes on. This "sad and unsatisfiable love" (p.57) parallels the priest´s unsatisfiable love for his daughter Brigitta, whom he meets for the first time in the following chapter.

Above all, the two radically different men are united by their self-forgetful devotion, each to his own cause. The lieutenant aims to create a revolutionary better society, eliminating the poverty, superstition and corruption that made his own boyhood miserable. The whisky priest hopes only by his sacramental acts to keep God alive in "all this space between the sea and the mountains" (p.65). Both feel a vast responsibility to the Mexican peasants, and both are willing to run personal risk to fulfill what they take to be their duty. The lieutenant is willing to bear the legal and moral responsibility of taking and shooting hostages; the whisky priest repeatedly misses his chance to escape for the sake of his "children", the Catholic peasants of each village.

The priest and the lieutenant are two of the three main characters (the mestizo, of course, being the third) who remain unnamed throughout the novel. This is, in part because they are identified by what they represent: the revolution versus the Church. And although neither of them can put a face to his enemy, each two fears and hates what the other represents. The lieutenant feels for the whisky priest "a natural hatred as between dog and dog" (p.22), stemming from his horror of the Catholicism that embodies to him everything ignorant and repressed in his boyhood. The whisky priest so greatly fears the lieutenant´s legal power that his fear supersedes even the importance of religious ceremonies: "penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death" (p.60).

Greene gives depth to both characters by allowing the reader indirect glimpses into their past: the lieutenant as the boy trapped in poverty, the energetic young priest to whom "the good things of life had come ... too early" (p.22), In fact, the ambition and smug arrogance of this scarcely recognizable younger priest reminds the reader of his antithesis, the lieutenant.

But the old life has long since "peeled away like a label" (p.94) and the priest´s outlook has changed since then. He has been both limited and empowered by what he thinks of as the "rubble of his failures" (p.60): limited because he loathes himself for being a whisky priest, but also empowered with a more empathetic and less judgmental perspective on the poverty and corruption that he sees in his fugitive journeys. The lieutenant can only denounce sin and suffering: the whisky priest has been crippled by guilt and has experienced the suffering of the impoverished peasant and the hunted man. This is the crucial difference between him and the lieutenant: because of the pain that "was forced on him" (p.70) he is in fact a more complete realist than the nihilistic lieutenant.

The perspective of the lieutenant is a dichotomisation between "old" and "new", the comforting opiate of Catholicism and the revolutionary brave new world. This does not make him any less complex or believable a character: Greene does not patronise the lieutenant´s nihilism, any more than he patronises the whisky priest´s inconsistencies. But it does make his ideals harder to empathise with. The reader empathises with the whisky priest, not because he necessarily identifies with the priest´s religious beliefs, but because whereas the lieutenant´s dichotomies apply to one country during one brief period of history, the flawed priest´s understanding of human nature and suffering is almost universal.