That evening the little group of searchers after God assembled again in the peaceful precincts of the Beaubien cottage. It was their third meeting, and they had come together reverently to pursue the most momentous inquiry that has ever stimulated human thought.
Haynerd and Carmen had said little relative to the Ames reception; but the former, still brooding over the certain consequences of his brush with Ames, was dejected and distraught. Carmen, leaning upon her sustaining thought, and conceding no mite of power or intelligence to evil, glowed like a radiant star.
“What are you listening to?” she asked of Haynerd, drawing him to one side. “Are you giving ear to the voices of evil, or good? Which are you making real to yourself? For those thoughts which are real to you will become outwardly manifested, you know.”
“Bah! He’s got us––tight!” muttered Haynerd, with a gesture signifying defeat. “And the insults of that arrogant daughter of his––”
“She did not insult me,” said Carmen quickly. “She could not, for she doesn’t know me. She merely denounced her concept of me, and not my real self. She vilified what she thought was Carmen Ariza; but it was only her own thought of me that she insulted. Can’t you see? And such a concept of me as she holds deserves denouncing, doesn’t it?”
“Well, what are we going to do?” he pursued testily.
“We are going to know,” she whispered, “that we two with God constitute an overwhelming majority.” She said nothing about her visit to the Wales home that morning, but pressed his hand, and then went to take her place at the table, where Father Waite was already rapping for order.
“My friends,” began that earnest young man, looking lovingly about at the little group, “as we are gathered here we symbolize that analytical, critical endeavor of the unbiased human mind to discover the essence of religion. Religion is that which binds us to absolute truth, and so is truth itself. If there is a God, we believe from our former investigations that He must be universal mind. This belief carries with it as necessary corollaries the beliefs that He must be perfect, eternal, 57 and self-existent. The question, Who made God? must then receive its sufficient answer in the staggering statement that He has always existed, unchanged and unchangeable.”
A sigh from Haynerd announced that quizzical soul’s struggle to grasp a statement at once so radical and stupendous.
“True,” continued Father Waite, addressing himself to his doubting friend, “the acceptance as fact of what we have deduced in our previous meetings must render the God of orthodox theology quite obsolete. But, as a compensation, it gives to us the most enlarged and beautiful concept of Him that we have ever had. It ennobles, broadens, purifies, and elevates our idea of Him. It destroys forever our belittling view of Him as but a magnified human character, full of wrath and caprice and angry threats, and delighting in human ceremonial and religious thaumaturgy. And, most practical of all for us, it renders the age-long problem of evil amenable to solution.”