More than six months had elapsed since Josè first set foot upon the hot shales of Simití. In that time his mentality had been turned over like a fallow field beneath the plowshare. 156 After peace had been established in the country he had often thought to consecrate himself to the task of collecting the fragmentary ideas which had been evolved in his mind during these past weeks of strange and almost weird experience, and trying to formulate them into definite statements of truth. Then he would enter upon the task of establishing them by actual demonstration, regardless of the years that might be required to do so. He realized now that the explorer had done a great work in clearing his mind of many of its darker shadows. But it was to Carmen’s purer, more spiritual influence that he knew his debt was heaviest.
Let it not seem strange that mature manhood and extensive travel had never before brought to this man’s mind the truths, many of which have been current almost since the curtain first arose on the melodrama of mundane existence. Well nigh impassable limitations had been set to them by his own natal characteristics; by his acutely morbid sense of filial love which bound him, at whatever cost, to observe the bigoted, selfish wishes of his parents; and by the strictness with which his mind had been hedged about both in the seminary and in the ecclesiastical office where he subsequently labored. The first rays of mental freedom did not dawn upon his darkened thought until he was sent as an outcast to the New World. Then, when his greater latitude in Cartagena, and his still more expanded sense of freedom in Simití, had lowered the bars, there had rushed into his mentality such a flood of ideas that he was all but swept away in the swirling current.
It is not strange that he rose and fell, to-day strong in the conviction of the immanence of infinite good, to-morrow sunken in mortal despair of ever demonstrating the truth of the ideas which were swelling his shrunken mind. His line of progress in truth was an undulating curve, slowly advancing toward the distant goal to which Carmen seemed to move in a straight, undeviating line. What though Emerson had said that Mind was “the only reality of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors”? Josè was unaware of the sage’s mighty deduction. What though Plato had said that we move as shadows in a world of ideas? Even if Josè had known of it, it had meant nothing to him. What though the Transcendentalists called the universe “a metaphore of the human mind”? Josè’s thought was too firmly clutched by his self-centered, material beliefs to grasp it. Doubt of the reality of things material succumbed to the evidence of the physical senses and the ridicule of his seminary preceptors. True, he believed with Paul, that the “things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal.” But this pregnant utterance conveyed 157 nothing more to him than a belief of a material heaven to follow his exit from a world of matter. It had never occurred to him that the world of matter might be the product of those same delusive physical senses, through which he believed he gained his knowledge of it. It is true that while in the seminary, and before, he had insisted upon a more spiritual interpretation of the mission of Jesus––had insisted that Christian priests should obey the Master’s injunction, and heal the sick as well as preach the gospel. But with the advent of the troubles which filled the intervening years, these things had gradually faded; and the mounting sun that dawned upon him six months before, as he lay on the damp floor of his little cell in the ecclesiastical dormitory in Cartagena, awaiting the Bishop’s summons, illumined only a shell, in which agnosticism sat enthroned upon a stool of black despair.
Then Carmen entered his life. And her beautiful love, which enfolded him like a garment, and her sublime faith, which moved before him like the Bethlehem star to where the Christ-principle lay, were, little by little, dissolving the mist and revealing the majesty of the great God.
In assuming to teach the child, Josè early found that the outer world meant nothing to her until he had purged it of its carnal elements. Often in days past, when he had launched out upon the dramatic recital of some important historical event, wherein crime and bloodshed had shaped the incident, the girl would start hastily from her chair and put her little hand over his mouth.
“Don’t, Padre dear! It is not true!” she would exclaim. “God didn’t do it, and it isn’t so!”
And thereby he learned to differentiate more closely between those historical events which sprang from good motives, and those which manifested only human passion, selfish ambition, and the primitive question, “Who shall be greatest?” Moreover, he had found it best in his frequent talks to the people in the church during the week to omit all reference to the evil methods of mankind in their dealings one with another, and to pass over in silence the criminal aims and low motives, and their externalization, which have marked the unfolding of the human mind, and which the world preserves in its annals as historical fact. The child seemed to divine the great truth that history is but the record of human conduct, conduct manifesting the mortal mind of man, a mind utterly opposed to the mind that is God, and therefore unreal, supposititious, and bearing the “minus” sign. Carmen would have none of it that did not reflect good. She refused utterly to turn her mental gaze toward recorded evil.
“Padre,” she once protested, “when I want to see the sun rise, I don’t look toward the west. And if you want to see the good come up, why do you look at these stories of bad men and their bad thoughts?”
Josè admitted that they were records of the mortal mind––and the mind that is mortal is no mind.