ar, infirmity of purpose, a high
degree of intellectuality, and a soul-permeating religious fervor.

At the mention of religion the timid lad at once became passionate,
engrossed--nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of
somber reticence had settled over him, he had been impressed with the
majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The
religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the
day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point
as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a
little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that
hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological
belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed
sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, treading the
heaving billows through the thick gloom, saved it at length from
destruction.

The hungry lad began to question his parents incessantly regarding the
things of the spirit. His teachers in the parochial school he plied
with queries which they could not meet. Day after day, while other
boys of his tender age romped in the street, he would steal into the
great Cathedral and stand, pathetically solitary, before the statues
of the Christ and the Virgin Mary, yearning over the problems with
which his childish thought was struggling, and the questions to which
no one could return satisfying replies.

Here again the boy seemed to manifest in exaggerated form the reversed
characteristics of the old _Conquistador_. But, unlike that of the
pious Juan, the mind of the little Jose was not so simple as to permit
it to accept without remonstrance the tenets of his family's faith.
Blind acceptance of any teaching, religious or secular, early became
quite impossible to him. This entailed many an hour of suffering to
the lad, and brought down upon his little head severe punishments from
his preceptors and parents. But in vain they admonished and
threatened. The child demanded proofs; and if proofs were not at hand,
his acceptance of the mooted teaching was but tentative, generally
only an outward yielding to his beloved mother's inexorable
insistence. Many the test papers he returned to his teachers whereon
he had written in answer to the questions set, "I am taught to reply
thus; but in my heart I do not believe it." Vainly the teachers
appealed to his parents. Futilely the latter pleaded and punish