. "_Kyrie Eleison_, _Christe
Eleison_."

He hesitated. With a tug he pulled his mind back to the work before
him. But why was he invoking clemency from One who knows no evil?
Heretofore he had always thought that God knew evil, that He must
recognize it, and that He strove Himself to overcome it. But if God
knew evil, then evil were real and eternal! Dreamily he began to
intone the _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_. All hail, thou infinite mind,
whose measureless depths mortal man has not even begun to sound! His
soul could echo that strain forever.

He turned to the Lesson and read: "But there went up a mist from the
earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God
formed man of the dust of the ground." He stopped a moment for
thought. The _Lord_ God! The mist of error watered the false
thought--the one lie about God--and out of it formed the man of flesh,
the false concept which is held in the minds of mortals. Aye, it was
the lie, posing as the Lord of creation, which had formed its false
man out of the dust of the ground, and had forced it upon the
acceptance of mankind! Jose turned back and read the whole of the
first chapter of Genesis, where he felt that he stood upon truth.

The tapers on the altar flickered fitfully. The disturbed bats
blundered among the rafters overhead. Outside, the dusty roads burned
with a white glare. Within, he and the people were worshiping God.
Worship? This? "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth." In _Truth_!

Jose recited the Nicene creed, with the thought that its man-made
fetters had bound the Christian world for dreary centuries. Then, the
Preface and Canon concluded, he pronounced the solemn words of
consecration which turned the bread and wine before him into the flesh
and blood of Christ Jesus. He looked at the wafer and the chalice long
and earnestly. He--Jose de Rincon--mortal, human, a weakling among
weaklings--could he command God by his "_Hoc est enim corpus meum_" to
descend from heaven to this altar? Could he so invoke the power of the
Christ as to change bread and wine into actual flesh and blood? And
yet, with all the priestly powers which Holy Church had conferred upon
him, he could not heal a single bodily ill, nor avert one human
misfortune!

Ah, pagan Rome! Well have you avenged yourself upon those who wrought
your fall, for in the death conflict you left the taint of your
paganism upon them, and it endur