“There is no stopping-place, Rosendo. There is no solid sky above us. Go whichever way you will, you can never reach an end.”
Rosendo’s brow knotted with puzzled wonder: Even Josè’s own mind staggered anew at its concept of the immeasurable depths of space.
“But, Padre, if we could go far enough up we would get to heaven, wouldn’t we?” pursued Rosendo. “And if we went far enough down we would reach purgatory, and then hell, is it not so?”
Restraint fell upon the priest. He dared not answer lest he reveal his own paucity of ideas regarding these things. Happily the loquacious Rosendo continued without waiting for reply.
“Padre Simón used to say when I was a child that the red we saw in the sky at sunset was the reflection of the flames of hell; so I have always thought that hell was below us––perhaps in the center of the earth.”
For a time his simple mind mused over this puerile idea. Then––
“What do you suppose God looks like, Padre?”
Josè’s thought flew back to the galleries and chapels of Europe, where the masters have so often portrayed their ideas of God in the shape of an old, gray-haired man, partly bald, 59 and with long, flowing beard. Alas! how pitifully crude, how lamentably impotent such childish concepts. For they saw in God only their own frailties infinitely magnified. Small wonder that they lived and died in spiritual gloom!
“Padre,” Rosendo went on, “if there is no limit to the universe, then it is––”
“Infinite in extent, Rosendo,” finished Josè.