“Why––it comes out that way; just like the answers to the problems in arithmetic. I used to try to see if by thinking only good thoughts to-day I would be better and happier to-morrow.”
“Yes, and––?”
“Well, I always was, Padre. And so now I don’t think anything but good thoughts.”
“That is, you think only about God?”
“I always think about Him first, Padre.”
He had no further need to question her proofs, for he knew she was taught by the Master himself.
“That will be all for this morning, Carmen,” he said quietly, as he put her down. “Leave me now. I, too, have some thinking to do.”
When Carmen left him, Josè lapsed into profound meditation. Musing over his life experiences, he at last summed them all up in the vain attempt to evolve an acceptable concept of God, an idea of Him that would satisfy. He had felt that in Christianity he had hold of something beneficent, something real; but he had never been able to formulate it, nor lift it above the shadows into the clear light of full comprehension. And the result of his futile efforts to this end had been agnosticism. His inability conscientiously to accept the mad reasoning of theologians and the impudent claims of Rome had been the stumbling block to his own and his family’s dearest earthly hopes. He knew that popular Christianity was a disfigurement of truth. He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a travesty of the divinely simple teachings of Jesus, and that it had estranged mankind from their only visible source of salvation, the Bible. He saw more clearly than ever before that in the actual achievements of popular theology there had been ridiculously little that a seriously-minded 46 man could accept as supports to its claims to be a divinely revealed scheme of salvation. Yet there was no vital question on which certainty was so little demanded, and seemingly of so little consequence, as this, even though the joints of the theologians’ armor flapped wide to the assaults of unprejudiced criticism.
But if the slate were swept clean––if current theological dogma were overthrown, and the stage set anew––what could be reared in their stead? Is it true that the Bible is based upon propositions which can be verified by all? The explorer in Cartagena had given Josè a new thought in Arnold’s concept of God as “the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And it was not to be denied that, from first to last, the Bible is a call to righteousness.
But what is righteousness? Ethical conduct? Assuredly something vastly more profound, for even that “misses the mark.” No, righteousness was right conduct until the marvelous Jesus appeared. But he swept it at once from the material into the mental; from the outward into the inward; and defined it as right-thinking!