we wait, we will keep our eyes open,
no?"

Yes, Jose would keep his eyes open and his heart receptive. After
all, as he meditated the situation in the quiet of his little cottage
that evening, he was not sorry that circumstances kept him longer in
Simiti. For he had long been meditating a plan, and the distraction
incident upon a complete change of environment certainly would delay,
if not entirely defeat, its consummation. He had planned to
translate his Testament anew, in the light of various works on
Bible criticism which the explorer had mentioned, and which the
possession of the newly discovered gold now made attainable. He had
with him his Greek lexicon. He would now, in the freedom from
interruption which Simiti could and probably would afford for the
ensuing few months, give himself up to his consecrated desire to
extract from the sacred writings the spiritual meaning crystallized
within them. The vivid experiences which had fallen to him in
Simiti had resulted in the evolution of ideas--radically at variance
with the world's materialistic thought, it is true--which he was
learning to look upon as demonstrable truths. The Bible had slowly
taken on a new meaning to him, a meaning far different from that
set forth in the clumsy, awkward phrases and expressions into which
the translators so frequently poured the wine of the spirit, and
which, literally interpreted, have resulted in such violent
controversies, such puerile ideas of God and His thought toward man,
and such religious hatred and bigotry, bloodshed, suffering, and
material stagnation throughout the so-called Christian era. He would
approach the Gospels, not as books of almost undecipherable
mystery, not as the biography of the blessed Virgin, but as
containing the highest human interpretation of truth and its relation
to mankind.

"I seek knowledge," he repeated aloud, as he paced back and forth
through his little living room at night; "but it is not a knowledge
of Goethe, of Kant, or Shakespeare; it is not a knowledge of the
poets, the scientists, the philosophers, all whom the world holds
greatest in the realm of thought; it is a knowledge of Thee, my
God, to know whom is life eternal! Men think they can know Homer,
Plato, Confucius--and so they can. But they think they can _not_
know Thee! And yet Thou art nearer to us than the air we breathe, for
Thou art Life! What is there out in the world among the multifold
interests of mankind that can equa