The dawn of a new day broke white and glistering upon the ancient pueblo. From their hard beds of palm, and their straw mats on the dirt floors, the provincial dwellers in this abandoned treasure house of Old Spain rose already dressed to resume the monotonous routine of their lowly life. The duties which confronted them were few, scarce extending beyond the procurement of their simple food. And for all, excepting the two or three families which constituted the shabby aristocracy of SimitÍ, this was limited in the extreme. Indian corn, panela, and coffee, with an occasional addition of platanos or rice, and now and then bits of bagre, the coarse fish yielded by the adjacent lake, constituted the staple diet of the 36 average citizen of this decayed hamlet. A few might purchase a bit of lard at rare intervals; and this they hoarded like precious jewels. Some occasionally had wheat flour; but the long, difficult transportation, and its rapid deterioration in that hot, moist climate, where swarms of voracious insects burrow into everything not cased in tin or iron, made its cost all but prohibitive. A few had goats and chickens. Some possessed pigs. And the latter even exceeded in value the black, naked babes that played in the hot dust of the streets with them.

JosÈ was up at dawn. Standing in the warm, unadulterated sunlight in his doorway he watched the village awaken. At a door across the plaza a woman appeared, smoking a cigar, with the lighted end in her mouth. JosÈ viewed with astonishment this curious custom which prevails in the Tierra Caliente. He had observed that in SimitÍ nearly everybody of both sexes was addicted to the use of tobacco, and it was no uncommon sight to see children of tender age smoking heavy, black cigars with keen enjoyment. From another door issued two fishermen, who, seeing the priest, approached and asked his blessing on their day’s work. Some moments later he heard a loud tattoo, and soon the Alcalde of the village appeared, marching pompously through the streets, preceded by his tall, black secretary, who was beating lustily upon a small drum. At each street intersection the little procession halted, while the Alcalde with great impressiveness sonorously read a proclamation just received from the central Government at BogotÁ to the effect that thereafter no cattle might be killed in the country without the payment of a tax as therein set forth. Groups of peones gathered slowly about the few little stores in the main street, or entered and inspected for the thousandth time the shabby stocks. Matrons with black, shining faces cheerily greeted one another from their doorways. Everywhere prevailed a gentle decorum of speech and manners. For, however lowly the station, however pinched the environment, the dwellers in this ancient town were ever gentle, courteous and dignified. Their conversation dealt with the simple affairs of their quiet life. They knew nothing of the complex problems, social, economic, or religious, which harassed their brethren of the North. No dubious aspirations or ambitions stirred their breasts. Nothing of the frenzied greed and lust of material accumulation touched their child-like minds. They dwelt upon a plane far, far removed, in whatever direction, from the mental state of their educated and civilized brothers of the great States, who from time to time undertake to advise them how to live, while ruthlessly exploiting them for material gain. And thus they have been exploited ever since the heavy hand of the 37 Spaniard was laid upon them, four centuries ago. Thus they will continue to be, until that distant day when mankind shall have learned to find their own in another’s good.

As his eyes swept his environment, the untutored folk, the old church, the dismally decrepit mud houses, with an air of desolation and utter abandon brooding over all; and as he reflected that his own complex nature, rather than any special malice of fortune, had brought this to him, JosÈ’s heart began to sink under the sting of a condemning conscience. He turned back into his house. Its pitiful emptiness smote him sore. No books, no pictures, no furnishings, nothing that ministers to the comfort of a civilized and educated man! And yet, amid this barrenness he had resolved to live.

A song drifted to him through the pulsing heat of the morning air. It sifted through the mud walls of his poor dwelling, and poured into the open doorway, where it hovered, quivering, like the dust motes in the sunbeams. Instantly the man righted himself. It was Carmen, the child to whom his life now belonged. Resolutely he again set his wandering mind toward the great thing he would accomplish––the protection and training of this girl, even while, if might be, he found his life again in hers. Nothing on earth should shake him from that purpose! Doubt and uncertainty were powerless to dull the edge of his efforts. His bridges were burned behind him; and on the other side of the great gulf lay the dead self which he had abandoned forever.

A harsh medley of loud, angry growls, interspersed with shrill yelps, suddenly arose before his house, and JosÈ hastened to the door just in time to see Carmen rush into the street and fearlessly throw herself upon two fighting dogs.

“Cucumbra! Stop it instantly!” she exclaimed, dragging the angry brute from a thoroughly frightened puppy.

“Shame! shame! And after all I’ve talked to you about loving that puppy!”

The gaunt animal slunk down, with its tail between its legs.

“Did you ever gain anything at all by fighting? You know you never did! And right down in your heart you know you love that puppy. You’ve got to love him; you can’t help it! And you might as well begin right now.”

The beast whimpered at her little bare feet.

“Cucumbra, you let bad thoughts use you, didn’t you? Yes, you did; and you’re sorry for it now. Well, there’s the puppy,” pointing to the little dog, which stood hesitant some yards away. “Now go and play with him,” she urged. “Play with him!” rousing the larger dog and pointing toward the puppy. “Play with him! You know you love him!”

Cucumbra hesitated, looking alternately at the small, resolute girl and the smaller dog. Her arm remained rigidly extended, and determination was written large in her set features. The puppy uttered a sharp bark, as if in forgiveness, and began to scamper playfully about. Cucumbra threw a final glance at the girl.

“Play with him!” she again commanded.

The large dog bounded after the puppy, and together they disappeared around the street corner.

The child turned and saw JosÈ, who had regarded the scene in mute astonishment.

“Muy buenos dias, SeÑor Padre,” dropping a little courtesy. “But isn’t Cucumbra foolish to have bad thoughts?”

“Why, yes––he certainly is,” replied JosÈ slowly, hard pressed by the unusual question.

“He has just got to love that puppy, or else he will never be happy, will he, Padre?”

Why would this girl persist in ending her statements with an interrogation! How could he know whether Cucumbra’s happiness would be imperfect if he failed in love toward the puppy?

“Because, you know, Padre,” the child continued, coming up to him and slipping her hand into his, “padre Rosendo once told me that God was Love; and after that I knew we just had to love everything and everybody, or else He can’t see us––can He, Padre?”

He can’t see us––if we don’t love everything and everybody! Well! JosÈ wondered what sort of interpretation the Vatican, with its fiery hatred of heretics, would put upon this remark.

“Can He, Padre?” insisted the girl.

“Dear child, in these matters you are teaching me; not I you,” replied the noncommittal priest.

“But, Padre, you are going to teach the people in the church,” the girl ventured quizzically.

Ah, so he was! And he had wondered what. In his hour of need the answer was vouchsafed him.

“Yes, dearest child––and I am going to teach them what I learn from you.”

Carmen regarded him for a moment uncertainly. “But, padre Rosendo says you are to teach me,” she averred.

“And so I am, little one,” the priest replied; “but not one half as much as I shall learn from you.”

DoÑa Maria’s summons to breakfast interrupted the conversation. Throughout the repast JosÈ felt himself subjected to the closest scrutiny by Carmen. What was running through her thought, he could only vaguely surmise. But he instinctively 39 felt that he was being weighed and appraised by this strange child, and that she was finding him wanting in her estimate of what manner of man a priest of God ought to be. And yet he knew that she embraced him in her great love. Oftentimes his quick glance at her would find her serious gaze bent upon him. But whenever their eyes met, her sweet face would instantly relax and glow with a smile of tenderest love––a love which, he felt, was somehow, in some way, destined to reconstruct his shattered life.

JosÈ’s plans for educating the girl had gradually evolved into completion during the past two days. He explained them at length to Rosendo after the morning meal; and the latter, with dilating eyes, manifested his great joy by clasping the priest in his brawny arms.

“But remember, Rosendo,” JosÈ said, “learning is not knowing. I can only teach her book-knowledge. But even now, an untutored child, she knows more that is real than I do.”

“Ah, Padre, have I not told you many times that she is not like us? And now you know it!” exclaimed the emotional Rosendo, his eyes suffused with tears of joy as he beheld his cherished ideals and his longing of years at last at the point of realization. What he, too, had instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart would at length be revealed. The man’s joy was ecstatic. With a final clasp of the priest’s hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into the work in progress at the church.

JosÈ summoned Carmen into the quiet of his own dwelling. She came joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much tattered book, which JosÈ discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic deeds of the early Conquistadores.

“I’m through decimals!” she exclaimed with glistening eyes; “and I’ve read some of this, but I don’t like it,” making a little moue of disgust and holding aloft the battered history.

“Padre Rosendo told me to show it to you,” she continued. “But it is all about murder, you know. And yet,” with a little sigh, “he has nothing else to read, excepting old newspapers which the steamers sometimes leave at Bodega Central. And they are all about murder, and stealing, and bad things, too. Padre, why don’t people write about good things?”

JosÈ gazed at her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in the unchiseled marble.

“Padre Rosendo helped me with the fractions,” went on the girl, flitting lightly to another topic; “but I had to learn the 40 decimals myself. He couldn’t understand them. And they are so easy, aren’t they? I just love arithmetic!” hugging the old book to her little bosom.

Both volumes, printed in Madrid, were reliques of Spanish colonial days.

“Read to me, Carmen,” said JosÈ, handing her the history.

The child took the book and began to read, with clear enunciation, the narrative of Quesada’s sanguinary expedition to BogotÁ, undertaken in the name of the gentle Christ. JosÈ wondered as he listened what interpretation this fresh young mind would put upon the motives of that renowned exploit. Suddenly she snapped the book shut.

“Tell me about Jesus,” she demanded.

The precipitation with which the question had been propounded almost took his breath away. He raised his eyes to hers, and looked long and wonderingly into their infinite depths. And then the vastness of the problem enunciated by her demand loomed before him. What, after all, did he know about Jesus? Had he not arrived in SimitÍ in a state of agnosticism regarding religion? Had he not come there enveloped in confusion, baffled, beaten, hopeless? And then, after his wonderful talk with Rosendo, had he not agreed with him that the child’s thought must be kept free and open––that her own instinctive religious ideas must be allowed to develop normally, unhampered and unfettered by the external warp and bias of human speculation? It was part of his plan that all reference to matters theological should be omitted from Carmen’s educational scheme. Yet here was that name on her lips––the first time he had ever heard it voiced by her. And it smote him like a hammer. He made haste to divert further inquiry.

“Not now, little one,” he said hastily. “I want to hear you read more from your book.”

“No,” she replied firmly, laying the volume upon the table. “I don’t like it; and I shouldn’t think you would, either. Besides, it isn’t true; it never really happened.”

“Why, of course it is true, child! It is history, the story of how the brave Spaniards came into this country long ago. We will read a great deal more about them later.”

“No,” with a decisive shake of her brown head; “not if it is like this. It isn’t true; I told padre Rosendo it wasn’t.”

“Well, what do you mean, child?” asked the uncomprehending priest.

“It is only a lot of bad thoughts printed in a book,” she replied slowly. “And it isn’t true, because God is everywhere.”

Clearly the man was encountering difficulties at the outset; and a part, at least, of his well-ordered curriculum stood in 41 grave danger of repudiation at the hands of this earnest little maid.

The girl stood looking at him wistfully. Then her sober little face melted in smiles. With childish impulsiveness she clambered into his lap, and twining her arms about his neck, impressed a kiss upon his cheek.

“I love you, Padre,” she murmured; “and you love me, don’t you?”

He pressed her to him, startled though he was. “God knows I do, little one!” he exclaimed.

“Of course He does,” she eagerly agreed; “and He knows you don’t want to teach me anything that isn’t true, doesn’t He, Padre dear?”

Yea, and more; for JosÈ was realizing now, what he had not seen before, that it was beyond his power to teach her that which was not true. The magnitude and sacredness of his task impressed him as never before. His puzzled brain grappled feebly with the enormous problem. She had rebuked him for trying to teach her things which, if he accepted the immanence of God as fact, her logic had shown him were utterly false. Clearly the grooves in which this child’s pure thought ran were not his own. And if she would not think as he did, what recourse was there left him but to accept the alternative and think with her? For he would not, even if he could, force upon her his own thought-processes.

“Then, Carmen,” he finally ventured, “you do not wish to learn about people and what they have done and are doing in the big world about you?”

“Oh, yes, Padre; tell me all about the good things they did!”

“But they did many wicked things too, chiquita. And the good and the bad are all mixed up together.”

“No,” she shook her head vigorously; “there isn’t any bad. There is only good, for God is everywhere––isn’t He?”

She raised up and looked squarely into the priest’s eyes. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, quibble, cant––nothing but fearless truth could meet that gaze.

Suddenly a light broke in upon his clouded thought. This girl––this tender plant of God––why, she had shown it from the very beginning! And he, oh, blind that he was! he could not see nor accept it. The secret of her power, of her ecstasy of life––what was it but this?––she knew no evil!

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

Oh, great God! It was the first––the very first––lesson 42 which Thou didst teach Thy child, Israel, as the curtain rose upon the drama of human life! And the awful warning has rung down through the corridors of time from the mouths of the prophets, whom we slew lest they wake us from our mesmeric sleep! Israel forgot Thy words; and the world has forgotten them, long, long since. Daily we mix our perfumed draft of good and evil, and sink under its lethal influence! Hourly we eat of the forbidden tree, till the pangs of death encompass us!

And when at last the dark angel hovered over the sin-stricken earth and claimed it for his own, the great Master came to sound again the warning––“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he!” But they would have none of him, and nailed him to a tree!

Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, ye incarnate human mind! Even the unique Son of God wept as he looked with yearning upon you! Why? Because of your stubborn clinging to false ways, false beliefs, false thoughts of God and man! Because ye would not be healed; ye would not be made whole! Ye loved evil––ye gave it life and power, and ye rolled it like a sweet morsel beneath your tongue––and so ye died! So came death into this fair world, through the heart, the brain, the mind of man, who sought to know what God could not!

“Padre dear, you are so quiet.” The girl nestled closer to the awed priest. Aye! And so the multitude on Sinai had stood in awed quiet as they listened to the voice of God.

This child knew no evil! The man could not grasp the infinite import of the marvelous fact. And yet he had sought to teach her falsities––to teach her that evil did exist, as real and as potent as good, and that it was to be accepted and honored by mankind! But she had turned her back upon the temptation.

“Padre, are you going to tell me about Jesus?”

The priest roused from his deep meditation.

“Yes, yes––I want to know nothing else! I will get my Bible, and we will read about him!”

“Bible? What is that, Padre dear?”

“What! You don’t know what the Bible is?” cried the astonished priest.

“No, Padre.”

“But have you never––has your padre Rosendo never told you that it is the book that tells––?”

“No,” the girl shook her head. “But,” her face kindling, “he told me that Jesus was God’s only son. But we are all His children, aren’t we?”

“Yes––especially you, little one! But Jesus was the greatest––”

“Did Jesus write the Bible, Padre?” the girl asked earnestly.

“No––we don’t know who did. People used to think God wrote it; but I guess He didn’t.”

“Then we will not read it, Padre.”

The man bent reverently over the little brown head and prayed again for guidance. What could he do with this child, who dwelt with Jehovah––who saw His reflection in every flower and hill and fleecy cloud––who heard His voice in the sough of the wind, and the ripple of the waters on the pebbly shore! And, oh, that some one had bent over him and prayed for guidance when he was a tender lad and his heart burned with yearning for truth!

“God wrote the arithmetic––I mean, He told people how to write it, didn’t He, Padre?”

Surely the priest could acquiesce in this, for mathematics is purely metaphysical, and without guile.

“Yes, chiquita. And we will go right through this little book. Then, if I can, I will send for others that will teach you wonderful things about what we call mathematics.”

The child smiled her approval. The priest had now found the only path which she would tread with him, and he continued with enthusiasm.

“And God taught people how to talk, little one; but they don’t all talk as we do. There is a great land up north of us, which we call the United States, and there the people would not understand us, for we speak Spanish. I must teach you their language, chiquita, and I must teach you others, too, for you will not always live in SimitÍ.”

“I want to stay here always, Padre. I love SimitÍ.” “No, Carmen; God has work for you out in His big world. You have something to tell His people some day, a message for them. But you and I have much work to do here first. And so we will begin with the arithmetic and English. Later we will study other languages, and we will talk them to each other until you speak them as fluently as your own. And meanwhile, I will tell you about the great countries of the world, and about the people that live in them. And we will study about the stars, and the rocks, and the animals; and we will read and work and read and work all day long, every day!” The priest’s face was aglow with animation.

“But, Padre, when shall I have time to think?”

“Why, you will be thinking all the time, child!”

“No, you don’t understand. I have to think about other things.”

JosÈ looked at her with a puzzled expression. “What other things do you have to think about, chiquita?”

“About all the people here who are sick and unhappy, and who quarrel and don’t love one another.”

“Do you think about people when they are sick?” he asked with heightened curiosity.

“Yes, always!” she replied vigorously “When they are sick I go where nobody can find me and then just think that it isn’t so.”

“Hombre!” the priest ejaculated, his astonishment soaring Then––

“But when people are sick it is really so, isn’t it, chiquita?”

“No!” emphatically. “It can’t be––not if God is everywhere. Does He make them sick?” The child drove the heart-searching question straight into him.

“Why––no, I can’t say that He does. And yet they somehow get sick.”

“Because they think bad things, Padre. Because they don’t think about God. They don’t think He is here. And they don’t care about Him––they don’t love Him. And so they get sick,” she explained succinctly.

JosÈ’s mind reverted to what Rosendo had told him. When he lay tossing in delirium Carmen had said that he would not die. And yet that was perfectly logical, if she refused to admit the existence of evil.

“I thought lots about you last week, Padre.”

The soft voice was close to his ear, and every breath swept over his heartstrings and made them vibrate.

“Every night when I went to sleep I told God I knew He would cure you.”

The priest’s head sank upon his breast.

Verily, I have not seen such faith, no, not in Israel! And the faith of this child had glorified her vision until she saw “the heavens open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

“Carmen”––the priest spoke reverently––“do the sick ones always get well when you think about them?”

There was not a shade of euphemism in the unhesitating reply––

“They are never really sick, Padre.”

“But, by that you mean––”

“They only have bad thoughts.”

“Sick thoughts, then?” he suggested by way of drawing out her full meaning.

“Yes, Padre––for God, you know, really is everywhere.”

“Carmen!” cried the man. “What put such ideas into your little head? Who told you these things?”

Her brown eyes looked full into his own. “God, Padre dear.”

God! Yes, of a verity she spoke truth. For nothing but her constant communion with Him could have filled her pure thought with a deeper, truer lore than man has ever quaffed at the world’s great fountains of learning. He himself, trained by Holy Church, deeply versed in letters, science, and theology, grounded in all human learning, sat in humility at her feet, drinking in what his heart told him he had at length found––Truth.

He had one more question to ask. “Carmen, how do you know, how are you sure, that He told you?”

“Because it is true, Padre.”

“But just how do you know that it is true?” he insisted.

“Why––it comes out that way; just like the answers to the problems in arithmetic. I used to try to see if by thinking only good thoughts to-day I would be better and happier to-morrow.”

“Yes, and––?”

“Well, I always was, Padre. And so now I don’t think anything but good thoughts.”

“That is, you think only about God?”

“I always think about Him first, Padre.”

He had no further need to question her proofs, for he knew she was taught by the Master himself.

“That will be all for this morning, Carmen,” he said quietly, as he put her down. “Leave me now. I, too, have some thinking to do.”

When Carmen left him, JosÈ lapsed into profound meditation. Musing over his life experiences, he at last summed them all up in the vain attempt to evolve an acceptable concept of God, an idea of Him that would satisfy. He had felt that in Christianity he had hold of something beneficent, something real; but he had never been able to formulate it, nor lift it above the shadows into the clear light of full comprehension. And the result of his futile efforts to this end had been agnosticism. His inability conscientiously to accept the mad reasoning of theologians and the impudent claims of Rome had been the stumbling block to his own and his family’s dearest earthly hopes. He knew that popular Christianity was a disfigurement of truth. He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a travesty of the divinely simple teachings of Jesus, and that it had estranged mankind from their only visible source of salvation, the Bible. He saw more clearly than ever before that in the actual achievements of popular theology there had been ridiculously little that a seriously-minded 46 man could accept as supports to its claims to be a divinely revealed scheme of salvation. Yet there was no vital question on which certainty was so little demanded, and seemingly of so little consequence, as this, even though the joints of the theologians’ armor flapped wide to the assaults of unprejudiced criticism.

But if the slate were swept clean––if current theological dogma were overthrown, and the stage set anew––what could be reared in their stead? Is it true that the Bible is based upon propositions which can be verified by all? The explorer in Cartagena had given JosÈ a new thought in Arnold’s concept of God as “the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And it was not to be denied that, from first to last, the Bible is a call to righteousness.

But what is righteousness? Ethical conduct? Assuredly something vastly more profound, for even that “misses the mark.” No, righteousness was right conduct until the marvelous Jesus appeared. But he swept it at once from the material into the mental; from the outward into the inward; and defined it as right-thinking!

“Righteousness!” murmured JosÈ, sitting with head buried in his hands. “Aye, the whole scheme of salvation is held in that one word! And the wreck of my life has been caused by my blind ignorance of its tremendous meaning! For righteousness is salvation. But Carmen, wise little soul, divined it instinctively; for, if there is one thing that is patent, it is that if a thing is evil it does not exist for her. Righteousness! Of course it means thinking no evil! Jesus lived his thorough understanding of it. And so does Carmen. And so would the world, but for the withering influence of priestly authority!”

At that moment Carmen reappeared to summon him to lunch.

“Come here, little girl,” said JosÈ, drawing her to him. “You asked me to tell you about Jesus. He was the greatest and best man that ever lived. And it was because he never had a bad thought.”

“Did he know that God was everywhere?” The little face turned lovingly up to his.

“He did, sweet child. And so do I––now; for I have found Him even in desolate SimitÍ.”