had
no texts, save the battered little arithmetic; and even that was
abandoned as soon as Carmen had mastered the decimal system.
Thereafter he wrote out each lesson for her, carefully wording it that
it might contain nothing to shock her acute sense of the allness of
God, and omitting from the vocabulary every reference to evil, to
failure, disaster, sin and death. In mathematics he was sure of his
ground, for there he dealt wholly with the metaphysical. But history
caused him many an hour of perplexity in his efforts to purge it of
the dross of human thought. If Carmen were some day to go out into the
world she _must_ know the story of its past. And yet, as Jose faced
her in the classroom and looked down into her unfathomable eyes, in
whose liquid depths there seemed to dwell a soul of unexampled purity,
he could not bring himself even to mention the sordid events in the
development of the human race which manifested the darker elements of
the carnal mind. Perhaps, after all, she might never go out into the
world. He had not the faintest idea how such a thing could be
accomplished. And so under his tutelage the child grew to know a world
of naught but brightness and beauty, where love and happiness dwelt
ever with men, and wicked thoughts were seen as powerless and
transient, harmless to the one who knew God to be "everywhere." The
man taught the child with the sad remembrance of his own seminary
training always before him, and with a desire, amounting almost to
frenzy, to keep from her every limiting influence and benumbing belief
of the carnal mind.

The decimal system mastered, Carmen was inducted into the elements of
algebra.

"How funny," she exclaimed, laughing, "to use letters for numbers!"

"They are only general symbols, little one," he explained. "Symbols
are signs, or things that stand for other things."

Then came suddenly into his mind how the great Apostle Paul taught
that the things we see, or think we see, are themselves but symbols,
reflections as from a mirror, and how we must make them out as best
we can for the present, knowing that, in due season, we shall see the
realities for which these things stand to the human mind. He knew that
back of the mathematical symbols stood the eternal, unvarying,
indestructible principles which govern their use. And he had begun to
see that back of the symbols, the phenomena, of human existence stands
the great principle--infinite God--the eternal mind. In the