"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 Simiti."
"I want to stay here always, Padre. I love Simiti." "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."
Jose 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.
Jose'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, Jose 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 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 Jose 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.