ittle
one!" he exclaimed.

"Of course He does," she eagerly agreed; "and He knows you don't want
to teach me anything that isn't true, doesn't He, Padre dear?"

Yea, and more; for Jose was realizing now, what he had not seen
before, that _it was beyond his power to teach her that which was not
true_. The magnitude and sacredness of his task impressed him as never
before. His puzzled brain grappled feebly with the enormous problem.
She had rebuked him for trying to teach her things which, if he
accepted the immanence of God as fact, her logic had shown him were
utterly false. Clearly the grooves in which this child's pure thought
ran were not his own. And if she would not think as he did, what
recourse was there left him but to accept the alternative and think
with her? For he would not, even if he could, force upon her his own
thought-processes.

"Then, Carmen," he finally ventured, "you do not wish to learn about
people and what they have done and are doing in the big world about
you?"

"Oh, yes, Padre; tell me all about the good things they did!"

"But they did many wicked things too, _chiquita_. And the good and the
bad are all mixed up together."

"No," she shook her head vigorously; "there isn't any bad. There is
only good, for God is everywhere--isn't He?"

She raised up and looked squarely into the priest's eyes. Dissimulation,
hypocrisy, quibble, cant--nothing but fearless truth could meet that
gaze.

Suddenly a light broke in upon his clouded thought. This girl--this
tender plant of God--why, she had shown it from the very beginning!
And he, oh, blind that he was! he could not see nor accept it. The
secret of her power, of her ecstasy of life--what was it but
this?--_she knew no evil!_

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the
garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

Oh, great God! It was the first--the very first--lesson which Thou
didst teach Thy child, Israel, as the curtain rose upon the drama of
human life! And the awful warning has rung down through the corridors
of time from the mouths of the prophets, whom we slew lest they wake
us from our mesmeric sleep! Israel forgot Thy words; and the world has
forgotten them, long, long since. Daily we mix our perfumed draft of
good and evil, and sink under its lethal influence! Hourly we eat of