“Fernando sends Juan to Bodega Central at daybreak,” the old man said. “All has been kept secret. No one suspects our 357 plans. Maria remains here with you until I return. Then we may go to the hacienda of Don Nicolás, on the Boque. I shall tell him to have it in readiness on my return. I shall probably not get back to Simití for two months. If, as you say, you still think best not to go with the Americans and the girl, what will you do here? The people are much divided. Some say they intend to ask the Bishop to remove you. Bien, will you not decide to go?”
Josè could not make audible reply. He shook his head, and waved Rosendo away. Then, taking a chair, he went into the sleeping room and sat down at the bedside of the slumbering girl. Reaching over, he took her hand.
What was it that she had said to him that day, long gone, when Diego claimed her as his child? Ah, yes:
“Don’t feel badly, Padre dear. His thoughts have only the minus sign––and that means nothing, you know.”
And later, many weeks later:
“Padre, you can not think wrong and right thoughts together, you know. You can not be happy and unhappy at the same time. You can not be sick and well together.” In other words, the wise little maid was trying to show him that Paul spoke directly to such as he when he wrote: Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are––?
“You can not have both good and evil, Padre,” she had so often insisted. “You must want good––want it more than anything else. And then you must prepare for it by thinking right thoughts and unthinking wrong ones. And as you prepare for good, you must know that it is coming. But you must not say how it shall come, nor what it shall look like. You must not say that it shall be just as you may think you would like to have it. Leave the––the externalization to God. Then it will meet all your needs.
“You see, Padre dear”––oh, how the memory of her words smote him now!––“you see, the good Jesus told the people to clean their window-panes and let in the light––good thoughts––for then these would be externalized in health, happiness, and all good, instead of the old, bad thoughts being externalized longer in sickness and evil. Don’t you see?”
Aye, he saw. He saw that the Christ-idea found expression and reflection in the pure mentality of this girl. He saw that that mentality was unsullied, uneducated in the lore of human belief, and untrained to fear. He saw that the resurrection of the Christ, for which a yearning world waits, was but the rising of the Christ-idea in the human mentality. And he saw, too, that ere the radiant resurrection morn can arrive there must be 358 the crucifixion, a world-wide crucifixion of human, carnal thought. Follow Christ! Aye, follow him! But will ye not learn that following him means thinking as he did? And his thoughts were God’s.
But Josè had tried to think aright during those years in Simití. True, but the efforts had been spasmodic. From childhood he had passed through doubt, fear, scepticism, and final agnosticism. Then he had started anew and aright. And then had come the “day of judgment,” the recurrent hours of sore trial––and he had not stood. Called upon to prove God, to prove the validity of his splendid deductions, he had vacillated between the opposing claims of good and evil, and had floundered helplessly. And now he stood confronting his still unsolved problem, realizing as never before that in the solving of it he must unlearn the intellectual habits of a lifetime.