“Only yesterday Professor Bales, of the University, lectured here on ‘The Prime Function of Education.’ He said it was the development of the individual, and that the chief end of educational work was the promotion of originality. And yet, when I think along original lines––when I depart from stereotyped formulæ, and state boldly that I will not accept any religion, be it Presbyterian, Methodist, or Roman Catholic, that makes a God of spirit the creator of a man of flesh, or that makes evil as real as good, and therefore necessarily created and recognized by a God who by very necessity can not know evil––then I am accused of being a heretic, a free-thinker; and the authorities take steps to remove me, lest my influence contaminate the rest of the pupils!”
“H’m––ah––yes, quite so––that is––I think––”
“Do you, a preacher, think?” the girl went on hurriedly. “Or do you only think that you think? Do you still believe with the world that the passing of a stream of human thought, or a series of mental pictures, through your mentality constitutes real thinking? Do you believe that jumping from one human mental concept to another twenty-four hours a day constitutes thinking? Have you yet learned to distinguish between God’s thoughts and their opposites, human thoughts? Do you know what Jesus taught? Have you a real, working, demonstrable knowledge of Christianity? Do you heal the sick, raise the dead, and preach the truth that sets men free from the mesmerism of evil? If so, then you are unevangelical, too, and you and I are both heretics, and we’d better––we’d better leave this building at once, for I find that the Inquisition is still alive, even in America!”
She stopped, and caught her breath. Her face was flushed, and her whole body quivered with emotion.
“The Inquisition! Why, my dear young lady, this is a Christian nation!”
“Then,” said the girl, “you have still much to learn from the pagan nations that have gone before.”
“Bless my soul!” exclaimed the doctor, again adjusting his glasses that he might see her more clearly. “My dear child, you have been thinking too much, and too seriously.”
“No, Doctor,” she replied; “but you preachers have not been thinking enough, nor even half seriously. Oh,” she went on, while her eyes grew moist, and ever and again her throat filled, “I had expected so much in this great country! And I have found so little––so little that is not wholly material, mechanical, and unreal! I had imagined that, with all your learning and progress, which Padre Josè told me about, you would know God much better than we in the darkened South. But your god is matter, machinery, business, gold, and the unreal things that can be bought with money. Some one wrote, in a recent newspaper, that America’s god was ‘mud and mammon!’ What do I find the girls here in this school talking about but dress, and society, and the unreal, passing pleasures of the physical senses! Do they know God? No––nor want to! Nor do the preachers! There are religious services here every Sunday, and sermons by preachers who come down from the city. Sometimes a Baptist; sometimes a Presbyterian; and sometimes an Episcopalian, or a Methodist. What is the result? Confusion––religious confusion. Each has a different concept of God; yet they all believe Him the creator of a man of flesh and bones, a man who was originally made perfect, but who fell, and was then cursed by the good and perfect God who made him. Oh, what childish views for men to hold and preach! How could a good God create anything that could fall? And if He could, and did, then He knew in advance that the man would fall, and so God becomes responsible, not man. Oh, Doctor, is it possible that you believe such stuff? How can you! how can you! Is it any wonder that, holding such awful views, you preachers have no longer the power to heal the sick? Do you not know that, in order to heal the sick, one must become spiritually-minded? But no one who holds to the puerile material beliefs embraced in your orthodox theology can possibly be spiritual enough to do the works Jesus said we should all do if we followed him––really understood him.”
“My dear child––you really are quite inconsistent––you––”