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.

But what is righteousness? Ethical conduct? Assuredly something vastly
more profo