“And if they thought right they would be cured without this––is it not so, Padre dear?”
“I am sure of it––now,” replied the priest. “In fact, if they always kept their thoughts right I am sure they would never be sick.”
“You mean, if they always thought about God,” the child amended.
“Yes––I mean just that. If they knew, really knew, that God is everywhere, that He is good, and that He never makes people sick, they would always be well.”
“Of course, Padre. It is only their bad thoughts that make them sick. And even then they are not really sick,” the child concluded. “They think they are, and they think they die––and then they wake up and find it isn’t so at all.”
Had the child made this remark to him a few weeks before, he had crushed it with the dull, lifeless, conventional formulæ 95 of human belief. To-day in penitent humility he was trying to walk hand in hand with her the path she trod. For he was learning from her that righteousness is salvation. A few weeks ago he had lain at death’s door, yearning to pass the portal. Yesterday he believed he had again seen the dark angel, hovering over the stricken Rosendo. But in each case something had intervened. Perhaps that “something not ourselves that makes for righteousness,” the unknown, almost unacknowledged force that ceases not to combat evil in the human consciousness. Clinging to his petty egoisms; hugging close his shabby convictions of an evil power opposed to God; stuffed with worldly learning and pride of race and intellect, in due season, as he sank under the burden of his imaginings, the veil had been drawn aside for a fleeting moment––and his soul had frozen with awe at what it beheld!
For, back of the density of the human concept, the fleeting, inexplicable medley of good and evil which constitutes the phenomenon of mortal existence, he had seen God! He had seen Him as all-inclusive mind, omnipotent, immanent, perfect, eternal. He had caught a moment’s glimpse of the tremendous Presence which holds all wisdom, all knowledge, yet knows no evil. He had seen a blinding flash of that “something” toward which his life had strained and yearned. With it had come a dim perception of the falsity of the testimony of physical sense, and the human life that is reared upon it. And though he counted not himself to have apprehended as yet, he was struggling, even with thanksgiving, up out of his bondage, toward the gleam. The shafts of error hissed about him, and black doubt and chill despair still felled him with their awful blows. But he walked with Carmen. With his hand in hers, he knew he was journeying toward God.
On the afternoon before his departure Rosendo entered the parish house in apprehension. “I have lost my escapulario, Padre!” he exclaimed. “The string caught in the brush, and the whole thing was torn from my neck. I––I don’t like to go back without one,” he added dubiously.
“Ah, then you have nothing left but Christ,” replied Josè with fine irony. “Well, it is of no consequence.”
“But, Padre, it had been blessed by the Bishop!”