Suddenly a light broke in upon his clouded thought. This girl––this tender plant of God––why, she had shown it from the very beginning! And he, oh, blind that he was! he could not see nor accept it. The secret of her power, of her ecstasy of life––what was it but this?––she knew no evil!
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Oh, great God! It was the first––the very first––lesson 42 which Thou didst teach Thy child, Israel, as the curtain rose upon the drama of human life! And the awful warning has rung down through the corridors of time from the mouths of the prophets, whom we slew lest they wake us from our mesmeric sleep! Israel forgot Thy words; and the world has forgotten them, long, long since. Daily we mix our perfumed draft of good and evil, and sink under its lethal influence! Hourly we eat of the forbidden tree, till the pangs of death encompass us!
And when at last the dark angel hovered over the sin-stricken earth and claimed it for his own, the great Master came to sound again the warning––“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he!” But they would have none of him, and nailed him to a tree!
Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, ye incarnate human mind! Even the unique Son of God wept as he looked with yearning upon you! Why? Because of your stubborn clinging to false ways, false beliefs, false thoughts of God and man! Because ye would not be healed; ye would not be made whole! Ye loved evil––ye gave it life and power, and ye rolled it like a sweet morsel beneath your tongue––and so ye died! So came death into this fair world, through the heart, the brain, the mind of man, who sought to know what God could not!
“Padre dear, you are so quiet.” The girl nestled closer to the awed priest. Aye! And so the multitude on Sinai had stood in awed quiet as they listened to the voice of God.
This child knew no evil! The man could not grasp the infinite import of the marvelous fact. And yet he had sought to teach her falsities––to teach her that evil did exist, as real and as potent as good, and that it was to be accepted and honored by mankind! But she had turned her back upon the temptation.
“Padre, are you going to tell me about Jesus?”
The priest roused from his deep meditation.
“Yes, yes––I want to know nothing else! I will get my Bible, and we will read about him!”