not? Death becomes
mental. Sin is mental. Spirit, the Creator, is mental. Matter is
mental. And we live and act in a mental realm, do we not? The sick
man, then, becomes one who misses the mark, and therefore a sinner. I
think you will agree with me that the sick man is not at peace with
God, if God is 'that which makes for righteousness.' Surely the maker
of that old Icelandic sixteenth-century Bible must have been inspired
when, translating from Luther's Bible, he wrote in the first chapter
of Genesis, 'And God created man after His own likeness, in the
likeness of _Mind_ shaped He him.' Cannot you see the foreshadowing to
which I have referred?"

Jose kept silence. The current of his thought seemed about to swerve
from its wonted course.

"What is coming is this," continued the explorer earnestly, "a
tremendous broadening of our concept of God, a more exalted, a more
worthy concept of Him as spirit--or, if you will, as mind. An
abandonment of the puerile concept of Him as a sort of magnified man,
susceptible to the influence of preachers, or of Virgin and Saints,
and yielding to their petitions, to their higher sense of justice, and
to money-bought earthly ceremonies to lift an imaginary curse from His
own creatures. And with it will come that wonderful consciousness of
Him which I now begin to realize that Jesus must have had, a
consciousness of Him as omnipotent, omnipresent good. As I to-day read
the teachings of Jesus I am constrained to believe that he was
conscious _only_ of God and God's spiritual manifestation. And in that
remarkable consciousness the man Jesus realized his own life--indeed,
that consciousness _was_ his life--and it included no sense of evil.
The great lesson which I draw from it is that evil must, therefore, be
utterly unreal and non-existent. And heaven is but the acquisition of
that mind or consciousness which was in Christ Jesus."

"But, Mr. Hitt, such ideas are revolutionary!"

"True, if immediately and generally adopted. And so you see why the
Church strives to hold the people to its own archaic and innocuous
religious tenets; why your Church strives so zealously to hold its
adherents fast to the rules laid down by pagan emperors and ignorant,
often illiterate churchmen, in their councils and synods; and why the
Protestant church is so quick to denounce as unevangelical everything
that does not measure to its devitalized concept of Christianity. They
do not practice what they preac