No, Josè assured himself, the Gospels are not “loose, exaggerated, inaccurate, credulous narratives.” They are the story of the clearest transparency to truth that was ever known to mortals as a human being. They preserve the life-giving words of him whose mission it was to show mankind the way out of error by giving them truth. They contain the rule given by the great Mathematician, who taught mankind how to solve their life-problems. They tell the world plainly that there seems to exist a lie about God; that every real idea of the infinite Mind seems to have its suppositional opposite in a material illusion. They tell us plainly that resisting these illusions with truth renders them nugatory. They tell us clearly that the man Jesus was so filled with truth that he proved the nothingness of the lie about God by doing those deeds that seemed marvelous in the eyes of men, and yet which he said we could and should do ourselves. And we must do them, if we would throw off the mesmerism of the lie. The human concept of man and the universe must dissolve in the light of the truth that comes through us as transparencies. And it were well if we set about 216 washing away the dirt of materialism, that the light may shine through more abundantly.
Jesus did not say that his great deeds were accomplished contrary to law, but that they fulfilled the law of God. The law is spiritual, never material. Material law is but human limitation. Ignorance of spiritual law permits the belief in its opposite, material law, or laws of matter. False, human beliefs, opinions, and theories, material speculations and superstitions, parade before the human mind as laws. Jesus swept them all aside by knowing that their supposed power lay only in human acceptance. The human mind is mesmerized by its own false thought. Even Paul at times felt its mesmerism and exclaimed: “I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.” The very idea of good stirs up its opposite in the human consciousness. But Paul rose above it and saw its nothingness. Then he cried: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” He recognized the spiritual law that Jesus employed; and with it he overcame the mesmerism of the lie.
“To be a Christian, then,” said Josè, “means not merely taking the name of Christ, and, while morally opposing sin, succumbing to every form of mesmerism that the lie about God exerts. No, it is infinitely more! It means recognizing the nature of God and His Creation, including Man, to be wholly spiritual––and the nature of the material creation and mankind as their opposite, as mental concepts, existing as false interpretations of the spiritual Universe and Man, and as having their place only in the false human consciousness, which itself is a mental activity concerned only with false thought, the suppositional opposite of God’s thought. It means taking this Truth, this spiritual law, as we would take a mathematical rule or principle, and with it overcoming sin, sickness, discord of every name and nature, even to death itself. What, oh, what have so-called Christians been doing these nearly two thousand years, that they have not ere this worked out their salvation as Jesus directed them to do? Alas! they have been mesmerized––simply mesmerized by the lie. The millennium should have come long, long ago. It would come to-day if the world would obey Jesus. But it will not come until it does obey him.”
Day after day, week after week, month after month, Josè delved and toiled, studied and pondered. The books which he ordered through the Empresa Alemania, and for which for some two months he waited in trembling anticipation and fear lest they be lost in transit, finally arrived. When Juan brought them up from Bodega Central, Josè could have wept for joy. Except for the very few letters he had received at rare intervals, 217 these were the only messages that had penetrated the isolation of Simití from the outside world in the two long years of his exile. His starving mind ravenously devoured them. They afforded his first introduction to that fearlessly critical thought regarding things religious which has swept across the world like a tidal wave, and washed away so many of the bulwarks of superstition and ignorance bred of fear of the unknown and supposedly unknowable.
And yet they were not really his first introduction to that thought, for, as he pored over these books, his heart expanded with gratitude to the brusque explorer whom he had met in Cartagena, that genial, odd medley of blunt honesty, unquibbling candor, and hatred of dissimulation, whose ridicule of the religious fetishism of the human mentality tore up the last root of educated orthodox belief that remained struggling for life in the altered soil of his mind.
But, though they tore down with ruthless hand, these books did not reconstruct. Josè turned from them with something of disappointment. He could understand why the trembling heart, searching wearily for truth, turned always from such as they with sinking hope. They were violently iconoclastic––they up-rooted––they overthrew––they swept aside with unsparing hand––but they robbed the starving mortal of his once cherished beliefs––they snatched the stale and feebly nourishing bread from his mouth, and gave nothing in return. They emptied his heart, and left it starving. What did it boot to tell a man that the orthodox dream of eternal bliss beyond the gates of death was but a hoax, if no substitute be offered? Why point out the fallacies, the puerile conceptions, the worse than childish thought expressed in the religious creeds of men, if they were not to be replaced by life-sustaining truth? If the demolition of cherished beliefs be not followed by reconstruction upon a sure foundation of demonstrable truth, then is the resulting state of mind worse than before, for the trusting, though deceived, soul has no recourse but to fall into the agnosticism of despair, or the black atheism of positive negation.
“Happily for me,” he sighed, as he closed his books at length, “that Carmen entered my empty life in time with the truth that she hourly demonstrates!”