“Bien, Rosendo,” he concluded in chastened tones. “We will think it over, and try to devise ways to accomplish the greatest good for the child. I shall remain here for the present.”
Rosendo’s face beamed with joy. “The way will be shown us some time, Padre!” he exclaimed. “And while we wait, we will keep our eyes open, no?”
Yes, Josè would keep his eyes open and his heart receptive. 210 After all, as he meditated the situation in the quiet of his little cottage that evening, he was not sorry that circumstances kept him longer in Simití. For he had long been meditating a plan, and the distraction incident upon a complete change of environment certainly would delay, if not entirely defeat, its consummation. He had planned to translate his Testament anew, in the light of various works on Bible criticism which the explorer had mentioned, and which the possession of the newly discovered gold now made attainable. He had with him his Greek lexicon. He would now, in the freedom from interruption which Simití could and probably would afford for the ensuing few months, give himself up to his consecrated desire to extract from the sacred writings the spiritual meaning crystallized within them. The vivid experiences which had fallen to him in Simití had resulted in the evolution of ideas––radically at variance with the world’s materialistic thought, it is true––which he was learning to look upon as demonstrable truths. The Bible had slowly taken on a new meaning to him, a meaning far different from that set forth in the clumsy, awkward phrases and expressions into which the translators so frequently poured the wine of the spirit, and which, literally interpreted, have resulted in such violent controversies, such puerile ideas of God and His thought toward man, and such religious hatred and bigotry, bloodshed, suffering, and material stagnation throughout the so-called Christian era. He would approach the Gospels, not as books of almost undecipherable mystery, not as the biography of the blessed Virgin, but as containing the highest human interpretation of truth and its relation to mankind.
“I seek knowledge,” he repeated aloud, as he paced back and forth through his little living room at night; “but it is not a knowledge of Goethe, of Kant, or Shakespeare; it is not a knowledge of the poets, the scientists, the philosophers, all whom the world holds greatest in the realm of thought; it is a knowledge of Thee, my God, to know whom is life eternal! Men think they can know Homer, Plato, Confucius––and so they can. But they think they can not know Thee! And yet Thou art nearer to us than the air we breathe, for Thou art Life! What is there out in the world among the multifold interests of mankind that can equal in importance a demonstrable knowledge of Thee? Not the unproven theories and opinions, the so-called ‘authority’ of the ancient Fathers, good men though they may have been; not modern pseudo-science, half-truths and relative facts, saturated with materialism and founded on speculation and hypothesis; but real knowledge, a knowledge of Thee that is as demonstrable as the simplest rule in mathematics! 211 Alas! that men should be so mesmerized by their own beliefs as to say Thou canst not be known. Alas! for the burden which such thinkers as Spencer have laid upon the shoulders of stumbling mankind. For God can be known, and proven––else is Jesus responsible for the most cruel lie ever perpetrated upon the ignorant, suffering world!”
And so, putting aside a portion of his gold––his by right of inheritance as well as discovery––for the future purchase of such books and aids as he might require, Josè set his house in order and then plunged into such a search of the Scriptures as rendered him oblivious to all but the immediate interests of Carmen and her foster-parents. The great world again narrowed into the rock-bound confines of little Simití. Each rushing morn that shot its fiery glow through the lofty treetops sank quickly into the hush of noon, while the dust lay thick, white, and hot on the slumbering streets of the ancient town; each setting sun burned with dreamy radiance through the afternoon haze that drew its filmy veil across the seething valley; each night died into a stillness, lonely and awful. Nature changed her garb with monotonous regularity; the drowsing children of this tropic region passed their days in dull torpidity; Josè saw nothing of it all. At times a villager would bring a tale of grievance to pour into his ears––perhaps a jaguar had pounced upon his dog on his little finca across the lake, or a huge snake had lured a suckling pig into its cavernous maw. At times a credulous woman would stop before his open door to dilate upon the thick worms that hung upon the leaves of the algarrobas and dropped their wool-like fibers upon the natives as they passed below, causing intermittent fevers. Perhaps an anxious mother would seek him for advice regarding her little son, who had eaten too much dirt, and was suffering from the common “jipitera,” that made his poor little abdomen protrude so uncomfortably. Again, Rosendo might steal in for a few moments’ mysterious, whispered talk about buried treasure, or the fables of El Dorado and Parimé. Josè had time for them all, though as he listened his thought hovered ever about the green verge of Galilee.
By his side worked Carmen, delving assiduously into the mysteries of mathematics and the modern languages. When the day’s work closed for them both, he often asked her to sing to him. And then, leaning back with closed eyes, he would yield himself to the soft dreams which her sweet voice called up from his soul’s unfathomed depths. Often they walked together by the lake on a clear night; and on these little excursions, during which they were never beyond Rosendo’s watchful eye, Josè reveled in the girl’s airy gaiety and the 212 spontaneous flow of her sparkling thought. He called her his domestic sunbeam; but in his serious moments––and they were many––he studied her with a wistful earnestness, while he sought to imbibe her great trust, her fearlessness, her unswerving loyalty to the Christ-principle of immanent Good. He would never permit restraint to be imposed upon her, even by Rosendo or his good wife. She knew not what it was to be checked in the freest manifestation of her natural character. But there was little occasion for restraint, for Carmen dwelt ever in the consciousness of a spiritual universe, and to it paid faithful tribute. She saw and knew only from a spiritual basis; and she reaped the rewards incident thereto. His life and hers were such as fools might label madness, a colorless, vegetative existence, devoid of even the elemental things that make mundane existence worth the while. But the appraisal of fools is their own folly. Josè knew that the torrid days which drew their monotonous length over the little town were witnessing a development in both himself and the child that some day would bear richest fruit. So far from being educated to distrust spiritual power, as are the children of this world, Carmen was growing up to know no other. Instead of the preponderance of her belief and confidence being directed to the material, she was developing the consciousness that the so-called evidence of the physical senses is but mortal thought, the suppositional opposite of the thought of the infinite God who says to mankind: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Josè knew that his method of education was revolutionary. But he also knew that it was not wholly his; that the child had really taken this course herself, as if led thereto by a power beyond them both.
And so he watched her, and sought to learn from her as from Christ’s own loving and obedient disciple. It was because of his obedience to God that Jesus was able to “prove” Him in the mighty works which we call miracles. He said, “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” Plain enough, indeed! And Carmen did do His will; she kept the very first Commandment; she walked by faith, and not by the sight of the human senses. She had been called an “hada,” a witch, by the dull-witted folk of Simití; and some day it would be told that she had a devil. But the Master had borne the same ignominy. And so has every pioneer in Truth, who has dared to lay the axe at the roots of undemonstrable orthodox belief and entrenched human error.
Josè often trembled for the child when he thought of the probable reception that awaited her in the world without, in 213 case she ever left Simití. Would her supreme confidence in good ever be weakened by an opposite belief in evil? Would her glorious faith ever be neutralized or counterbalanced by faith in a power opposed to God? He wondered. And sometimes in the fits of abstraction resulting from these thoughts, the girl would steal up to him and softly whisper, “Why, Padre, are you trying to make two and two equal seven?” Then he would laugh with her, and remember how from her algebraic work she had looked up one day and exclaimed, “Padre––why, all evil can be reduced to a common denominator, too––and it is zero!”
As recreation from the task of retranslating his Greek Testament, Josè often read to Carmen portions from the various books of the Bible, or told her the old sacred stories that children so love to hear. But Carmen’s incisive thought cut deep into them, and Josè generally found himself hanging upon the naïve interpretations of this young girl. When, after reading aloud the two opposing accounts of the Creation, as given in the first and second chapters of Genesis, she asked, “But, Padre, why did God change His mind after He made people and gave them dominion over everything?” Josè was obliged to say that God had not made a mistake, and then gone back afterward to rectify it; that the account of the Creation, as given in Genesis, was not His, but was a record of the dawning upon the human thought of the idea of the spiritual Creation; that the “mist” which went up from the earth was suppositional error; and that the record of the Creation which follows after this was only the human mind’s interpretation of the real, spiritual Creation, that Creation which is the ever unfolding of infinite Mind’s numberless, perfect ideas. The book of Genesis has been a fetish to human minds; and not until the limitations imposed by its literal interpretation were in a measure removed did the human mentality begin to rise and expand. And when, reading from Isaiah, the grandest of the ancient prophets, the ringing words, “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” the child asked him if that did not refer to the very kind of people with whom they had daily intercourse, he had been obliged to say that it did, and that that sort of man was far, very far, from being the man of God’s own creating.
“The mist, child, which is mentioned in the second chapter of Genesis, is said to have gone up from the ground. That is, it went up from matter. And so it is typical of materialism, from which all evil comes. The material is the direct opposite of the spiritual. Every bit of evil that men think they can see, or know, or do, comes as testimony of the five material 214 senses. These might well be called the ‘ground’ senses. In the book of Genesis, you will notice that the account of the real comes first; then follows the account of its opposite, the unreal man of dust.”