thout witness."
How often he had tried to see the hopeless confusion of good and evil
in the world about him as a witness to the One who is of purer eyes
than to behold evil. And he had at last abandoned his efforts in
despair. Yet that there must be something behind the complex phenomena
which men call life, he knew. Call it what he would--law, force, mind,
God, or even X, the great unknown quantity for which life's intricate
equations must be solved--yet _something_ there was in it all which
endured in an eternal manifestation. But could that something endure
in an expression both good and evil?

He had long since abandoned all study of the Bible. But in these last
days there had begun to dawn upon him the conviction that within that
strange book were locked mysteries which far transcended the wildest
imaginings of the human mind. With it came also the certainty that
Jesus had been in complete possession of those sacred mysteries. There
could be no question now that his mission had been woefully
misunderstood, often deliberately misinterpreted, and too frequently
maliciously misused by mankind. His greatest sayings, teachings so
pregnant with truth that, had they been rightfully appropriated by
men, ere this would have dematerialized the universe and revealed the
spiritual kingdom of God, had been warped by cunning minds into crude
systems of theology and righteous shams, behind which the world's
money-changers and sellers of doves still drove their wicked traffic
and offered insults to Truth in the temple of the Most High.

Oh, how he now lamented the narrowness and the intellectual
limitations with which his seminary training had been hedged about!
The world's thought had been a closed book to him. Because of his
morbid honesty, only such pages reached his eye as had passed the
bigoted censorship of Holy Church. His religious instruction had been
served to him with the seal of infallible authority. Of other systems
of theology he had been permitted only the Vatican's biased
interpretation, for the curse of Holy Church rested upon them. Of
current philosophical thought, of Bible criticism and the results of
independent scriptural research, he knew practically nothing--little
beyond what the explorer had told him in their memorable talks a few
weeks before in Cartagena. But, had he known it, these had unbarred
the portals of his mind to the reception of the new ideas which, under
a most powerful stimulus, were now f