. "On one side, Padre, is the infinite
mind, God, and all His thoughts and ideas, all good, perfect and
eternal. On the other side is the lie about it all. That is still
mental; but it is illusion, falsity. It includes all sin, all
sickness, all murder, all evil, accidents, loss, failure, bad
ambitions, and death. These are all parts of the big lie about
God--His unreal opposite. These are the so-called thoughts that come
to the human mind. Where do they come from? From nowhere. The human
mind looks at them, tastes them, feels them, holds them; and then they
become its beliefs. After a while the human mind looks at nothing but
these beliefs. It believes them to be real. And, finally, it comes to
believe that God made them and sent them to His children. Isn't it
awful, Padre! And aren't you glad that you know about it? And aren't
you going to learn how to keep the good on one side of that line and
the illusion on the other?"

It seemed to Jose a thing incredible that these words were coming from
a girl of fifteen. And yet he knew that at the same tender age he was
as deeply serious as she--but with this difference: he was then
tenaciously clinging to the thoughts that she was now utterly
repudiating as unreal and non-existent.

"Padre dear," the girl resumed, "everything is mental. The whole
universe is mental."

"Well," he replied reflectively, "at least our comprehension of it is
wholly mental."

"Why--it is all inside--it is all in our thought! Padre, when Hernando
plays on that old pipe of his, where is the music? Is it in the pipe?
Or is it in our thoughts?"

"But, _chiquita_, we don't seem to have it in our thought until we
seem to see him playing on the pipe, do we?"

"No, we don't," she replied. "And do you know why? It is just because
the human mind believes that everything, even music, must come from
matter--must have a--"

"Must have a material origin? Is that what you mean?"

"Yes. And men even believe that life itself has a material origin; and
so they have wasted centuries trying to find it in the body. They
don't seem to want to know that God is life."

"Then, _chiquita_, you do not believe that matter is real?"

"There is no matter outside of us, or around us, Padre," she said in
reply. "The human mind looks at its thoughts and seems to see them out
around it as things made of matter. But, after all, it only sees its
thoughts."

"Then I suppose that the externalization of our thought in our