He came too soon. Events show that."

"Well, then, would he be accepted to-day, if he had not come before?"

"I can not say. But--I think he would not."

"And I quite agree with you," she said firmly. "Now the world has
doctored for more than four thousand years, despite the fact that
health is not sold in bottle or pill form. Doctor, what does the
history of all these centuries of drugging show you?"

He hesitated. Carmen waited a moment; then continued:

"Don't they demonstrate the absolute inability of medicines to cure
disease?" she asked. "Any more than putting men in prison cures
crime?" she added as an afterthought.

"They at least prove that medication has not _permanently_ removed
disease," he ventured, not wishing to go too far.

"Doctor," she said earnestly, "that man Jesus, who, according to you,
came too soon, said: 'Without me ye can do nothing.' Well, didn't he
come very, very close to the truth when he made that statement? He did
not say that without drugs or material remedies we could do nothing,
but that without the Christ-principle mankind would continue, as
before, to miss the mark. He showed that disease and discord result
from sin. Sin is lack of righteousness, lack of right-thinking about
things. It is wrong belief, false thought. Sin is mental. Its effect,
disease, is mental--a state of discordant consciousness. Can you with
drugs change a state of mind?"

"Certainly," he replied quickly. "Whiskey and opium cause changes in
one's state of mind."

"No," she answered. "But the human belief of power inherent in whiskey
and opium, or of the human body's reaction to them, causes a change in
the human thought-activity that is called consciousness. The state of
human consciousness changes with the belief, but not the real state of
mind. Can you not see that? And Doctor Bolton--"

"Bolton was not sick. He died of natural causes, old age, and general
breakdown," was the doctor's refuge.

Carmen laughed and sprang down from the table. "What an obstinately
obdurate lot you scientific men are!" she exclaimed. "Don't you know
that you doctors are only a development of the old 'medicine-man'? Now
in the first place, Mr. Bolton isn't dead; and, in the second, there
are no _natural_ causes of death. Old age? Why, that's gone out of
fashion, long since."

"You deny senile changes--?"

"I deny every human error!" she interrupted.

"Then," with a note of banter in his voice, "I take it that you do