Carmen Ariza Part 52

"True, _chiquita_. Love, life, joy, knowledge, wisdom, health, harmony--all these are spiritual ideas. The physical sometimes manifests them--and sometimes does not. And in the end, called death, it ceases altogether to manifest them."

"But--these things--the very greatest things there are--are the souls of everything--is it not so, Padre dear?"

"It must be, _chiquita_."

"And all these things came from G.o.d, and He is everywhere, and so He is the soul of everything, no?"

He made the same affirmative reply.

"Padre--don't you see it?--we are not seeing things all around us! We don't see real things that we call trees and stones and people! We see only what we _think_ we see. We see things that are not there at all!

We see--"

"Yes, we see only our thoughts. And we think we see them as objects all about us, as trees, and houses, and people. But in the final a.n.a.lysis we see only thoughts," he finished.

"But these thoughts do not come from G.o.d," she insisted.

"No," he replied slowly, "because they often manifest discord and error. I think I grasp what is struggling in your mind _chiquita_. G.o.d is--"

"Everywhere," she interrupted.

"He is everywhere, and therefore He is the soul--the inside--the heart and core--of everything. He is mind, and His thoughts are real, and are the only real thoughts there are. He is truth. The opposite of truth is a lie. But, in reality, truth cannot have an opposite.

Therefore, a lie is a supposition. And so the thought that we seem to see externalized all about us, and that we call physical objects, is supposition only. And, a supposition being unreal, the whole physical universe, including material man, is unreal--is a supposition, a supposition of mixed good and evil, for it manifests both. It is the lie about G.o.d. And, since a lie has no real existence, this human concept of a universe and mankind composed of matter is utterly unreal, an image of thought, an illusion, existing in false thought only--a belief--a supposition pure and simple!"

As he talked he grew more and more animated. He seemed to forget the presence of the child, and appeared to be addressing only his own insistent questionings.

They walked along together in silence for some moments. Then the girl again took up the conversation.

"Padre," she said, "you know, you taught me to prove my problems in arithmetic and algebra. Well, I have proved something about thinking, too. If I think a thing, and just keep thinking it, pretty soon I see it--in some way--outside of me."

A light seemed to flash through Jose's mental chambers, and he recalled the words of the explorer in Cartagena. Yes, that was exactly what he had said--"every thought that comes into the mind tends to become _externalized_, either upon the body as a physical condition, or in the environment, or as an event, good or bad." It was a law, dimly perceived, but nevertheless sufficiently understood in its workings to indicate a tremendous field as yet all but unknown. The explorer had called it the law of the externalization of thought. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," said the Master, twenty centuries before. Did he recognize the law?

Jose's thought swept over his past. Had his own wrong thinking, or the wrong thought of others, been the cause of his unhappiness and acute mental suffering? But why personalize it? What difference whether it be called his, or the Archbishop's, or whose? Let it suffice that it was false thought, undirected by the Christ-principle, G.o.d, that had been externalized in the wreckage which he now called his past life.

He again stood face to face with the most momentous question ever propounded by a waiting world: the question of causation. And he knew now that causation was wholly spiritual.

"Padre dear, you said just now that G.o.d was mind. But, if that is true, there is only one mind, for G.o.d is everywhere."

"It must be so, _chiquita_," dreamily responded the priest.

"Then He is your mind and my mind, is it not so?"

"Yes--"

"Then, if He is my mind, there just isn't anything good that I can't do."

Twilight does not linger in the tropics, and already the shadows that stole down through the valley had wrapped the man and child in their mystic folds. Hand in hand they turned homeward.

"Padre, if G.o.d is my mind, He will do my thinking for me. And all I have to do is to keep the door open and let His thoughts come in."

Her sweet voice lingered on the still night air. There was a pensive gladness in the man's heart as he tightly held her little hand and led her to Rosendo's door.

CHAPTER 18

The next morning Jose read to Rosendo portions of the communication from Wenceslas.

"Chiquinquia," commented the latter. "I remember that Padre Diego collected much money from our people for Ma.s.ses to be said at that shrine."

"But where is it, Rosendo?" asked Jose.

"You do not know the story?" queried Rosendo in surprise. "Why, there is not a shrine in the whole of Colombia that works so many cures as this one. Your grandfather, Don Ignacio, knew the place. And it was from him that my--that is, I learned the legend when I was only a boy.

It is said that a poor, sick young girl in the little Indian village of Chiquinquia, north of Bogota, stood praying in her shabby little cottage before an old, torn picture of the blessed Virgin." He stopped and crossed himself devoutly. Then he resumed:

"_Bueno_, while the girl prayed, the picture suddenly rose up in the air; the torn places all closed; the faded colors came again as fresh as ever; and the girl was cured of her affliction. The people of the village immediately built a shrine, over which they hung the picture; and ever since then the most wonderful miracles have been performed by it there."

Jose laughed. "You don't believe that, do you, Rosendo?" he asked in banter.

"_Hombre_, yes!" exclaimed the latter a bit testily. "I know it! Did not Don Felipe go there when the doctor in Mompox told him the little white spot on his hand was leprosy? And he came back cured."

Leprosy! Jose started as if he had received a blow. He looked furtively at the scar on his own hand, the hand which the leper in Maganguey had lacerated that dreadful night, and which often burned and ached as if seared by a hot iron. He had never dared to voice the carking fear that tightened about his heart at times. But often in the depths of night, when dread antic.i.p.ation sat like a spectre upon his bed, he had risen and gone out into the darkness to wrestle with his black thoughts. Leprosy! All the gladness and joy left his heart, and a pall of darkness settled over his thought. He turned back into his cottage and tried to find forgetfulness in the simple duties that lay at hand.

"Why is it," he asked himself, as he sat wearily down at his little table, "that I always think of evil first; while Carmen's first thought is invariably of G.o.d?"

He looked at the ugly scar on his hand. What thought was externalized in the loathsome experience which produced that? he wondered. Was it the summation of all the fear, the weakness, the wrong belief, that had filled his previous years? And now why was he finding it so difficult to practice what Carmen lived, even though he knew it was truth?

"Alas!" he murmured aloud, "it was the seminary that did it. For there my thought was educated away from the simple teachings of Jesus. To Carmen there is no mystery in G.o.dliness. Though she knows utterly nothing about Jesus, yet she hourly uses the Christ-principle. It is the children who grasp the simple truths of G.o.d; while the lack of spirituality which results from increasing years shrinks maturer minds until they no longer afford entrance to it. For G.o.dliness is broad; and the mind that receives it must be opened wide."

As he sat with his bowed head clasped in his hands, a sweet, airy voice greeted him.

"Why, Padre dear--ah, I caught you that time!--you were thinking that two and two are seven, weren't you?" She shook a rebuking finger at him.

Framed in the doorway like an old masterpiece, the sunlight bronzing her heavy brown curls, the olive-tinted skin of her bare arms and legs flus.h.i.+ng with health, and her cheap calico gown held tightly about her, showing the contour of her full and shapely figure, the girl appeared to Jose like a vision from the realm of enchantment. And he knew that she did dwell in the land of spiritual enchantment, where happiness is not at the mercy of physical sense.

"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?"

"The Lord our G.o.d is a right-thinking G.o.d, and right-thinking is what He desires in His people."

Jose thought of this as he looked at Carmen. This barefoot girl, who walked humbly, trustingly, with her G.o.d, had she not supplied him with a working formula for his every problem, even to the casting out of the corroding fear planted in his heart by that awful experience in Maganguey? Though he had suffered much, yet much had been done for him. The brusque logic of the explorer had swept his mind clear of its last vestige of theological superst.i.tion, and prepared it for the truth which, under the benign stimulus of this clear-minded child, would remake his life, if he could now yield himself utterly to it. He must--he would--ceaselessly strive, even though he fell daily, to make his life a pattern of hers, wherein there was no knowledge of evil!

The girl came to the priest and leaned fondly against him. Then a little sigh escaped her lips, as she looked down into his face with pitying affection.

"Padre dear," she said, in a tone that echoed a strain of sadness, "I--I don't believe--you love G.o.d very much."

The man was startled, and resentment began to well in his heart. "What a thing to say, Carmen!" he answered reprovingly.

The girl looked up at him with great, wondering eyes. "But, Padre,"