“God help us!” muttered Josè under his breath. “Two thousand years of Christianity, and still the world knows not what Jesus taught!”
“But you told me he had good thoughts, Padre dear,” said the little voice at his side, as he walked slowly away with bended head. “And that is enough to know.”
“Why do you say that, Carmen?” asked Josè, somewhat petulantly.
“Because, Padre, if he had good thoughts, he thought about God––didn’t he? And if he thought about God, he always thought of something good. And if we always think about good––well, isn’t that enough?”
Josè’s eyes struggled with hers. She almost invariably framed her replies with an interrogation, and, whether he would or not, he must perforce give answers which he knew in his heart were right, and yet which the sight of his eyes all too frequently denied.
“Padre, you are not thinking about God now––are you?”
“I am, indeed, child!” he answered abruptly.
“Well––perhaps you are thinking about Him; but you are not thinking with Him––are you?––the way He thinks. You know, He sends us His thoughts, and we have to pick them out from all the others that aren’t His, and then think them. If the señora and her man had been thinking God’s thoughts, they wouldn’t have been afraid to eat a piece of meat on Friday––would they?”
Cucumbra, forgetting his many months of instruction, suddenly yielded to the goad of animal instinct and started along the beach in mad pursuit of a squealing pig. Carmen dashed after him. As Josè watched her lithe, active little body bobbing over the shales behind the flying animals, she seemed to him like an animated sunbeam sporting among the shadows.
“Why should life,” he murmured aloud, “beginning in radiance, 146 proceed in ever deepening gloom, and end at last in black night? Why, but for the false education in evil which is inflicted upon us! The joys, the unbounded bliss of childhood, do indeed gush from its innocence––its innocence of the blighting belief in mixed good and evil––innocence of the false beliefs, the undemonstrable opinions, the mad worldly ambitions, the carnal lust, bloated pride, and black ignorance of men! It all comes from not knowing God, to know whom is life eternal! The struggle and mad strife of man––what does it all amount to, when ‘in the end he shall be a fool’? Do we in this latest of the centuries, with all our boasted progress in knowledge, really know so much, after all? Alas! we know nothing––nothing!”