“At last, you come!”

The querulous tones of the aged Bishop eddied the brooding silence within the Cathedral. Without waiting for a reply he turned again to his table and took up a paper containing a list of names.

“You wait until midday,” he continued testily; “but you give me time to reflect and decide. The parish of SimitÍ has long been vacant. I have assigned you to it. The Honda touches at Calamar to-morrow, going up-river. You will take it.”

“SimitÍ! Father––!”

“Bien; and would you dispute this too!” quavered the ill-humored Bishop.

“But––SimitÍ––you surely cannot mean––!”

The Bishop turned sharply around. “I mean that after what I learn from Rome I will not keep you here to teach your heresies in our University! I mean that after what I hear this morning of your evil practices I will not allow you to spend another day in Cartagena!” The angry ecclesiastic brought his bony fist hard against the table to emphasize the remark.

“Madre de Dios!” he resumed, after some moments of nursing his choleric feelings. “Would you debate further! The Holy Father for some unexplained reason inflicts a madman upon me! And I, innocent of what you are, obey his instructions and place you in the University––with what result? You have the effrontery––the madness––to lecture to your classes on the heresies of Rome!”

“But––”

“And as if that were not burden enough for these old shoulders, I must learn that I have taken a serpent to my bosom––but that you are still sane enough to propagate heresies––to plot revolution with the Radicals––and––shame consume you!––to wantonly ruin the fair daughters of our diocese! But, do you see now why I send you where you can do less evil than here in Cartagena?”

The priest slowly petrified under the tirade.

“The fault is not mine if I must act without instruction from Rome,” the Bishop went on petulantly. “Twice have I warned you against your teachings––but I did not suspect then, for only yesterday did I learn that before coming to me you had been 91 confined in a monastery––insane! But––Hombre! when you bring the blush of shame to my cheeks because of your godless practices––it is time to put you away without waiting for instruction!”

Godless practices! Was the Bishop or the priest going mad?

“Go now to your room,” the Bishop added, turning again to his table. “You have little enough time to prepare for your journey. Wenceslas will give you letters to the Alcalde of SimitÍ.”

Wenceslas! The priest’s thought flew back over the events of the morning. Marcelena––Maria––the encounter below with––! Dios! Could it be that Wenceslas had fastened upon him the stigma of his own crime? The priest found his tongue.

“Father!––it is untrue!––these charges are false as hell!” he exclaimed excitedly. “I demand to know who brings them against me!”

The testy Bishop’s wrath flared up anew. “You demand! Am I to sit here and be catechised by you? It is enough that I know what occurs in my diocese, and am well informed of your conduct!”

The doorway darkened, and the priest turned to meet the object of his suspecting thought.

Bestowing a smile of patronage upon JosÈ, and bowing obsequiously before the Bishop, Wenceslas laid some papers upon the table, remarking as he did so, “The letters, Your Grace, to introduce our JosÈ to his new field. Also his instructions and expense money.”

“Wenceslas!” The priest confronted him fiercely. “Do you accuse me before the Bishop?”

“Accuse, amigo?” Wenceslas queried in a tone of assumed surprise. “Have I not said that your ready tongue and pen are your accusers? But,” with a conciliatory air, “we must remember that our good Bishop mercifully views your conduct in the light of your recent mental affliction, traces of which, unfortunately, have lingered to cause him sorrow. And so he graciously prepares a place for you, caro amigo, where rest and relief from the strain of teaching will do you much good, and where life among simple and affectionate people will restore you, he hopes, to soundness of mind.”

The priest turned again to the Bishop in a complexity of appeal. The soft speech of Wenceslas, so full of a double entendu, so markedly in contrast with the Bishop’s harsh but at least sincere tirade, left no doubt in his mind that he was now the victim of a plot, whose ramifications extended back to the confused circumstances of his early life, and the doubtful purposes of his uncle and his influence upon the sacerdotal directors 92 in Rome. And he saw himself a helpless and hopelessly entangled victim.

“Father!” In piteous appeal JosÈ held out his hands to the Bishop, who had turned his back upon him and was busy with the papers on his table.

“Amigo, the interview is ended,” said Wenceslas quietly, stepping between the priest and his superior.

JosÈ pushed wildly past the large form of Wenceslas and seized the Bishop’s hand.

“Santa Maria!” cried the petulant churchman. “Do you obey me, or no? If not, then leave the Church––and spend your remaining days as a hounded ex-priest and unfrocked apostate,” he finished significantly. “Go, prepare for your journey!”

Wenceslas slipped the letter and a few pesos into the hand of the smitten, bewildered JosÈ, and turning him to the door, gently urged him out and closed it after him.

Just why the monastery gates had opened to him after two years’ deadening confinement, JosÈ had not been apprised. All he knew was that his uncle had appeared with a papal appointment for him to the University of Cartagena, and had urged his acceptance of it as the only course likely to restore him both to health and position, and to meet the deferred hopes of his sorrowing mother.

“Accept it, sobrino mÍo,” the uncle had said. “Else, pass your remaining days in confinement. There can be no refutation of the charges against you. But, if these doors open again to you, think not ever to sever your connection with the Church of Rome. For, if the RincÓn honor should prove inadequate to hold you to your oath, be assured that RincÓn justice will follow you until the grave wipes out the stain upon our fair name.”

“Then, tÍo mÍo, let the Church at once dismiss me, as unworthy to be her son!” pleaded JosÈ.

“What, excommunication?” cried the horrified uncle. “Never! Death first! Are you still mad?”

JosÈ looked into the cold, emotionless eyes of the man and shuddered. The ancient spirit of the Holy Inquisition lurked there, and he cowered before it. But at least the semblance of freedom had been offered him. His numbed heart already had taken hope. He were indeed mad not to acquiesce in his uncle’s demands, and accept the proffered opportunity to leave forever the scenes of his suffering and disgrace. And so he bowed again before the inexorable.

Arriving in Cartagena some months before this narrative opens, he had gradually yielded himself to the restorative effects 93 of changed environment and the hope which his uncle’s warm assurances aroused, that a career would open to him in the New World, unclouded by the climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child into the fold of the Church. The Bishop had assigned him at once to pedagogical work in the University; and in the teaching of history, the languages, and, especially, his beloved Greek, JosÈ had found an absorption that was slowly dimming the memory of the dark days which he had left behind in the Old World.

But the University had not afforded him the only interest in his new field. He had not been many weeks on Colombian soil when his awakening perceptions sensed the people’s oppression under the tyranny of ecclesiastical politicians. Nor did he fail to scent the approach of a tremendous conflict, in which the country would pass through violent throes in the struggle to shake off the galling yoke of Rome. Maintaining an attitude of strict neutrality, he had striven quietly to gauge the anticlerical movement, and had been appalled to find it so widespread and menacing. Only a miracle could save unhappy Colombia from being rent by the fiercest of religious wars in the near future. Oh, if he but had the will, as he had the intellectual ability, to throw himself into the widening breach!

“There is but one remedy,” he murmured aloud, as he sat one evening on a bench in the plaza of SimÓn BolÍvar, watching the stream of gaily dressed promenaders parading slowly about on the tesselated walks, but hearing little of their animated conversation.

“And what is that, may I ask, friend?”

The priest roused up with a start. He had no idea that his audible meditations had been overheard. Besides, he had spoken in English. But this question had been framed in the same tongue. He looked around. A tall, slender man, with thin, bronzed face and well-trimmed Van Dyke beard, sat beside him. The man laughed pleasantly.

“Didn’t know that I should find any one here to-night who could speak my lingo,” he said cordially. “But, I repeat, what is the remedy?”

“Christianity,” returned the amazed JosÈ, without knowing what he said.

“And the condition to be remedied?” continued the stranger.

“This country’s diseased––but to whom have I the honor of speaking?” drawing himself up a little stiffly, and glancing about to see who might be observing them.

“Oh, my credentials?” laughed the man, as he caught JosÈ’s wondering look. “I’m quite unknown in Cartagena, unfortunately. You must pardon my Yankee inquisitiveness, but I’ve watched you out here for several evenings, and have wondered what weighty problems you were wrestling with. A quite unpardonable offense, from the Spanish viewpoint, but wholly forgivable in an uncouth American, I’m sure. Besides, when I heard you speak my language it made me a bit homesick, and I wanted to hear more of the rugged tongue of the Gentiles.”

Laughing again good-naturedly, he reached into an inner pocket and drew out a wallet. “My name’s Hitt,” he said, handing JosÈ his card. “But I didn’t live up to it. That is, I failed to make a hit up north, and so I’m down here.” He chuckled at his own facetiousness. “Amos A. Hitt,” he went on affably. “There used to be a ‘Reverend’ before it. That was when I was exploring the Lord’s throne. I’ve dropped it, now that I’m humbly exploring His footstool instead.”

JosÈ yielded to the man’s friendly advances. This was not the first American he had met; yet it seemed a new type, and one that drew him strongly.

“So you think this country diseased, eh?” the American continued.

JosÈ did not answer. While there was nothing in the stranger’s appearance and frank, open countenance to arouse suspicion, yet he must be careful. He was living down one frightful mistake. He could not risk another. But the man did not wait for a reply.

“Well, I’m quite agreed with you. It has priest-itis.” He stopped and looked curiously at JosÈ, as if awaiting the effect of his bold words. Then––“I take it you are not really one of ’em?”

JosÈ stared at the man in amazement. Hitt laughed again. Then he drew forth a cigar and held it out. “Smoke?” he said. The priest shook his head. Hitt lighted the cigar himself, then settled back on the bench, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets, and his long legs stuck straight out in front, to the unconcealed annoyance of the passers-by. But, despite his brusquerie and his thoughtlessness, there was something about the American that was wonderfully attractive to the lonely priest.

“Yes, sir,” Hitt went on abstractedly in corroboration of his former statement, “Colombia is absolutely stagnant, due to Jesuitical politics, the bane of all good Catholic countries. If she could shake off priestcraft she’d have a chance––provided she didn’t fall into orthodox Protestantism.”

JosÈ gasped, though he strove to hide his wonder. “You––” he began hesitatingly, “you were in the ministry––?”

“Yes. Don’t be afraid to come right out with it. I was a Presbyterian divine some six years ago, in Cincinnati. Ever been there?”

JosÈ assured him that he had never seen the States.

“H’m,” mused the ex-preacher; “great country––wonderful––none like it in the world! I’ve been all over, Europe, Asia, Africa––seen ’em all. America’s the original Eden, and our women are the only true descendants of mother Eve. No question about it, that apple incident took place up in the States somewhere––probably in Ohio.”

JosÈ caught the man’s infectious humor and laughed heartily. Surely, this American was a tonic, and of the sort that he most needed. “Then, you are––still touring––?”

“I’m exploring,” Hitt replied. “I’m here to study what ancient records I may find in your library; then I shall go on to Medellin and BogotÁ. I’m on the track of a prehistoric Inca city, located somewhere in the Andes––and no doubt in the most inaccessible spot imaginable. Tradition cites this lost city as the cradle of Inca civilization. Tampu Tocco, it is called in their legends, the place from which the Incas went out to found that marvelous empire which eventually included the greater part of South America. The difficulty is,” he added, knotting his brows, “that the city was evidently unknown to the Spaniards. I can find no mention of it in Spanish literature, and I’ve searched all through the libraries of Spain. My only hope now is that I shall run across some document down here that will allude to it, or some one who has heard likely Indian rumors.”

JosÈ rubbed his eyes and looked hard at the man. “Well!” he ejaculated, “you are––if I may be permitted to say it––an original type.”

“I presume I am,” admitted the American genially. “I’ve been all sorts of things in my day, preacher, teacher, editor. My father used to be a circuit rider in New England forty years ago or more. Pious––good Lord! Why, he was one of the kind who believe the good book ‘from kiver to kiver,’ you know. Used to preach interminable sermons about the mercy of the Lord in holding us all over the smoking pit and not dropping us in! Why, man! after listening to him expound the Scriptures at night I used to go to bed with my hair on end and my skin all goose-flesh. No wonder I urged him to send me to the Presbyterian Seminary!”

“And you were ordained?” queried JosÈ, dark memories rising in his own thought.

“Thoroughly so! And glad I was of it, too, for I had grown up as pious and orthodox as my good father. I considered the ordination a through ticket to paradise.”

“But––now––”

“Oh, I found myself in time,” continued the man, answering JosÈ’s unspoken thought. “Then I stopped preaching beautiful legends, and tried to be genuinely helpful to my congregation. I had a fine church in Cincinnati at that time. But––well, I mixed a trifle too much heresy into my up-to-date sermons, I guess. Anyway, the Assembly didn’t approve my orthodoxy, and I had as little respect for its heterodoxy, and the upshot of it was that I quit––cold.” He laughed grimly as he finished the recital. “But,” he went on gravely, “I now see that it was due simply to my desire to progress beyond the acceptance of tradition and allegory as truth, and to find some better foundation upon which to build than the undemonstrable articles of faith embraced in the Westminster Confession. To me, that confession of faith had become a confession of ignorance.” He turned his shrewd eyes upon JosÈ. “I was in somewhat the same mental state that I think you are in now,” he added.

“And why, if I may ask, are you now exploring?” asked JosÈ, disregarding the implication.

“Oh, as for that,” replied the American easily, “I used to teach history and became especially interested in ancient civilizations, lost cities, and the like, in the Western Hemisphere. Long before I left the ministry oil was struck on our little Pennsylvania farm, and––well, I didn’t have to work after that. So for some years I’ve devoted myself strictly to my particular hobby of travel. And in my work I find it necessary to discard ceremony, and scrape acquaintance with all sorts and conditions. I especially cultivate clergymen. I’ve wanted to know you ever since I first saw you out here. But I couldn’t wait for a formal introduction. And so I broke in unceremoniously upon your meditations a few moments ago.”

“I am grateful to you for doing so,” said JosÈ frankly, holding out a hand. “There is much that you can tell me––much that I want to know. But––” He again looked cautiously around.

“Ah, I understand,” said Hitt, quickly sensing the priest’s uneasiness. “What say you, shall we meet somewhere down by the city wall? Say, at the old Inquisition cells?”

JosÈ nodded his acquiescence, and they separated. A few minutes later the two were seated in one of the cavernous archways of the long, echoing corridor which leads to the deserted barracks and the gloomy, bat-infested cells beneath. A vagrant breeze drifted now and then across the grim wall above them, 97 and the deserted road in front lay drenched in the yellow light of the tropic moon. There was little likelihood of detection here, where the dreamy plash of the sea drowned the low sound of their voices; and JosÈ breathed more freely than in the populous plaza which they had just left.

“Good Lord!” muttered the explorer, returning from a peep into the foul blackness of a subterranean tunnel, “imagine what took place here some three centuries ago!”

“Yes,” returned JosÈ sadly; “and in the reeking dungeons of San Fernando, out there at the harbor entrance. And, what is worse, my own ancestors were among the perpetrators of those black deeds committed in the name of Christ.”

“Whew! You don’t say! Tell me about it.” The explorer drew closer. JosÈ knew somehow that he could trust this stranger, and so he briefly sketched his ancestral story to his sympathetic listener. “And no one knows,” he concluded in a depressed tone, “how many of the thousands of victims of the Inquisition in Cartagena were sent to their doom by the house of RincÓn. It may be,” he sighed, “that the sins of my fathers have been visited upon me––that I am now paying in part the penalty for their criminal zeal.”

The explorer sat for some time in silent meditation. “Perhaps,” he said, “your family fell under the spell of old Saint Dominic. You know the legend? How God deliberated long whether to punish the wickedness of mankind by sending down war, plague, or famine, and was finally prevailed upon by Saint Dominic to send, instead, the Holy Inquisition. Another choice example of the convenient way the world has always had of attributing the foulest deeds of men to the Almighty. No wonder religion has so woefully declined!”

“But is it so up in the great North?” asked JosÈ. “Tell me, what is the religious status there? My limitations have been such that I have––I have not kept abreast of current theological thought.”

“In the United States the conventional, passive submission to orthodox dogma is rapidly becoming a thing of the past,” the explorer replied. “The people are beginning to think on these topics. All human opinion, philosophical, religious, or scientific, is in a state of liquefaction––not yet solidified. Just what will crystallize out of the magma is uncertain. The country is experiencing a religious crisis, and an irresistible determination to know is abroad in the land. Everything is being turned upside-down, and one hardly dares longer say what he believes, for the dogma of to-day is the fairy-tale of to-morrow. And, through it all, as some one has tersely said, ‘orthodoxy is hanging onto the coat-tails of progress in a vain attempt to stop 98 her.’ We are facing in the United States the momentous question, Is Christianity a failure? Although no one knows what Christianity really is. But one thing is certain, the brand of Christianity handed out by Protestant and Catholic alike is mighty close to the borderline of dismal failure.”

“But is there in the North no distinct trend in religious belief?” queried JosÈ.

The explorer hesitated. “Yes,” he said slowly, “there is. The man who holds and promulgates any belief, religious or scientific, is being more and more insistently forced to the point of demonstration. The citation of patristic authority is becoming daily more thoroughly obsolete.”

“And there is no one who demonstrates practical Christianity?”

“No. Do you? Is there any one in your Church, or in the Protestant faith, who does the works which Christ is reported to have done? Is there any one who really tries to do them? Or thinks he could if he tried? The good church Fathers from the third century down could figure out that the world was created on the night before the twenty-third of October, four thousand and four B. C., and that Adam’s fall occurred about noon of the day he was created. They could dilate ad nauseam on transubstantiation, the divine essence, and the mystery of the Trinity; they could astonishingly allegorize the Bible legends, and read into every word a deep, hidden, incomprehensible sense; they could prove to their own satisfaction that Adam composed certain of the Psalms; that Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch, even the story of his own death and burial; and that the entire Bible was delivered by God to man, word for word, just as it stands, including the punctuation. And yet, not one of them followed the simple commands of Jesus closely enough to enable him to cure a toothache, to say nothing of generally healing the sick and raising the dead! Am I not right?”

“Yes––I am sorry to have to admit,” murmured JosÈ.

“Well,” went on the explorer, “that’s what removed me from the Presbyterian ministry. It is not Christianity that is a dismal failure, but men’s interpretation of it. Of true Christianity, I confess I know little. Oh, I’m a fine preacher! And yet I am representative of thousands of others, like myself, all at sea. Only, the others are either ashamed or afraid to make this confession. But, in my case, my daily bread did not depend upon my continuance in the pulpit.”

“But supposing that it had––”

“The result doubtless would have been the same. The orthodox faith was utterly failing to supply me with a satisfying interpretation 99 of life, and it afforded me no means of escaping the discords of mundane existence. It could only hold out an undemonstrable promise of a life after death, provided I was elected, and provided I did not too greatly offend the Creator during the few short years that I might spend on earth. If I did that, then, according to the glorious Westminster Confession, I was doomed––for we are not so fortunate as you in having a purgatory from which we may escape through the suffrages of the faithful,” he concluded with a chuckle.

JosÈ knew, as he listened, that his own Church would hold this man a blasphemer. The man by his own confession was branded a Protestant heretic. And he, JosÈ, was anathema for listening to these sincere, brutally frank confidences, and tendering them his warm sympathy. Yet he sat spellbound.

“And so I retired from the ministry,” continued the explorer. “I had become ashamed of tearing down other men’s religious beliefs. I was weary of having to apologize constantly for the organization to which I was attached. At home I had been taught a devout faith in revealed religion; in the world I was thrown upon its inquiring doubts; I yearned for faith, yet demanded scientific proof. Why, I would have been satisfied with even the slight degree of proof which we are able to advance for our various physical sciences. But, no, it was not forthcoming. I must believe because the Fathers had believed. I struggled between emotion and reason, until––well, until I had to throw it all over to keep from going mad.”

JosÈ bowed in silence before this recital of a soul-experience so closely paralleling his own.

“But, come,” said the explorer cheerily, “I’m doing all the talking. Now––”

“No! no!” interrupted the eager JosÈ. “I do not wish to talk. I want to hear you. Go on, I beg of you! Your words are like rain to a parched field. You will yet offer me something upon which I can build with new hope.”

“Do not be so sanguine, my friend,” returned the explorer in a kindly tone. “I fear I shall be only the reaper, who cuts the weeds and stubble, and prepares the field for the sower. I have said that I am an explorer. But my field is not limited to this material world. I am an explorer of men’s thoughts as well. I am in search of a religion. I manifest this century’s earnest quest for demonstrable truth. And so I stop and question every one I meet, if perchance he may point me in the right direction. My incessant wandering about the globe is, if I may put it that way, but the outward manifestation of my ceaseless search in the realm of the soul.”

He paused. Then, reaching out and laying a hand upon the 100 priest’s knee, he said in a low, earnest voice, “My friend, something happened in that first year of our so-called Christian era. What it was we do not know. But out of the smoke and dust, the haze and mist of that great cataclysm has proceeded the character Jesus––absolutely unique. It is a character which has had a terrific influence upon the world ever since. Because of it empires have crumbled; a hundred million human lives have been destroyed; and the thought-processes of a world have been overthrown or reversed. Just what he said, just what he did, just how he came, and how he went, we may not know with any high degree of accuracy. But, beneath all the myth and legend, the lore and childish human speculation of the intervening centuries, there must be a foundation of eternal truth. And it must be broad––very broad. I am digging for it––as I dug on the sites of ancient Troy and Babylon––as I have dug over the buried civilizations of Mexico and Yucatan––as I shall dig for the hidden Inca towns on the wooded heights of the Andes. And while I dig materially I am also digging spiritually.”

“And what have you found?” asked JosÈ hoarsely.

“I am still in the overburden of dÉbris which the sedulous, tireless Fathers heaped mountain high upon the few recorded teachings of Jesus. But already I see indications of things to come that would make the members of the Council of Trent and the cocksure framers of the Westminster Confession burst from their graves by sheer force of astonishment! There are even now foreshadowings of such revolutionary changes in our concept of God, of the universe, of matter, and the human mind, of evil, and all the controverted points of theological discussion of this day, as to make me tremble when I contemplate them. In my first hasty judgment, after dipping into the ‘Higher Criticism,’ I concluded that Jesus was but a charlatan, who had learned thaumaturgy in Egypt and practiced it in Judea. Thanks to a better appreciation of the same ‘Higher Criticism’ I am reconstructing my concept of him now, and on a better basis. I once denounced God as the creator of both good and evil, and of a man who He knew must inevitably fall, even before the clay of which he was made had become fairly dry. I changed that concept later to Matthew Arnold’s ‘that something not ourselves that makes for righteousness.’ But mighty few to-day recognize such a God! Again, in Jesus’ teaching that sin brought death into the world, I began to see what is so dimly foreshadowed to-day, the mental nature of all things. ‘Sin’ is the English translation of the original ‘hamartio,’ which means, ‘to miss the mark,’ a term used in archery. Well, then, missing the mark is the mental result of nonconformity to law, is it 101 not? And, going further, if death is the result of missing the mark, and that is itself due to mental cause, and, since death results from sickness, old age, or catastrophe, then these things must likewise be mental. Sickness, therefore, becomes wholly mental, does it not? Death becomes mental. Sin is mental. Spirit, the Creator, is mental. Matter is mental. And we live and act in a mental realm, do we not? The sick man, then, becomes one who misses the mark, and therefore a sinner. I think you will agree with me that the sick man is not at peace with God, if God is ‘that which makes for righteousness.’ Surely the maker of that old Icelandic sixteenth-century Bible must have been inspired when, translating from Luther’s Bible, he wrote in the first chapter of Genesis, ‘And God created man after His own likeness, in the likeness of Mind shaped He him.’ Cannot you see the foreshadowing to which I have referred?”

JosÈ kept silence. The current of his thought seemed about to swerve from its wonted course.

“What is coming is this,” continued the explorer earnestly, “a tremendous broadening of our concept of God, a more exalted, a more worthy concept of Him as spirit––or, if you will, as mind. An abandonment of the puerile concept of Him as a sort of magnified man, susceptible to the influence of preachers, or of Virgin and Saints, and yielding to their petitions, to their higher sense of justice, and to money-bought earthly ceremonies to lift an imaginary curse from His own creatures. And with it will come that wonderful consciousness of Him which I now begin to realize that Jesus must have had, a consciousness of Him as omnipotent, omnipresent good. As I to-day read the teachings of Jesus I am constrained to believe that he was conscious only of God and God’s spiritual manifestation. And in that remarkable consciousness the man Jesus realized his own life––indeed, that consciousness was his life––and it included no sense of evil. The great lesson which I draw from it is that evil must, therefore, be utterly unreal and non-existent. And heaven is but the acquisition of that mind or consciousness which was in Christ Jesus.”

“But, Mr. Hitt, such ideas are revolutionary!”

“True, if immediately and generally adopted. And so you see why the Church strives to hold the people to its own archaic and innocuous religious tenets; why your Church strives so zealously to hold its adherents fast to the rules laid down by pagan emperors and ignorant, often illiterate churchmen, in their councils and synods; and why the Protestant church is so quick to denounce as unevangelical everything that does not measure to its devitalized concept of Christianity. They do not practice what they preach; yet they would not have you 102 practice anything else. The human mind that calls itself a Christian is a funny thing, isn’t it?”

He laughed lightly; then lapsed into silence. The sea breeze rose and sighed among the great, incrusted arches. The restless waves moaned in their eternal assault upon the defiant walls. The moon clouded, and a warm rain began to fall. JosÈ rose. “I must return to the dormitory,” he announced briefly. “When you pass me in the plaza to-morrow evening, come at once to this place. I will meet you here. You have––I must––”

But he did not finish. Pressing the explorer’s hand, he turned abruptly and hurried up the dim, narrow street.