brief
meditation.

"Well, then, God doesn't know anything about mistakes--does He?"

"No, _chiquita_."

"And He knows everything."

"Yes."

"Then, Padre dear, nobody can know anything about mistakes. People
just think they can--don't they?"

Jose thought hard for a few moments. "_Chiquita_, can you know that
two and two are seven?"

"Why, Padre dear, how funny!"

"Yes--it does seem strange--now. And yet, I used to think I could know
things just as absurd."

"Why, what was that, Padre?"

"I thought, _chiquita_, that I could know evil--something that God
does not and can not know."

"But--could you, Padre?"

"No, child. It is absolutely impossible to know--to really _know_--error
of any sort."

"If we knew it, Padre, it would have a rule; or as you say, a
principle, no?"

"Exactly, child."

"And, since God is everywhere, He would have to be its principle."

"Just the point. Now take another of the problems, _chiquita_, and
work on it while I think about these things," he said, assigning
another of the simple tasks to the child.

For an idea was running through the man's thought, and he had traced
it back to the explorer in Cartagena. Reason and logic supported the
thought of God as mind; of the creation as the unfolding of this
mind's ideas; and of man as the greatest idea of God. It also seemed
to show that the physical senses afforded no testimony at all, and
that human beings saw, heard and felt only in thought, in belief. On
this basis everything reduced to a mental plane, and man became a
mentality. But what sort of mentality was that which Jose saw all
about him in sinful, sick and dying humanity? The human man is
demonstrably mortal--and he is a sort of mind--ah, yes, that was it!
The explorer had said that up in that great country north there were
those who referred to this sort of mentality as "mortal mind." Jose
thought it an excellent term. For, if the mortal man is a mind at all,
he assuredly is a _mortal_ mind.

And the mortal mind is the opposite of that mind which is the eternal
God. But God can have no real opposite. Any so-called opposite to Him
must be a supposition--or, as Jesus defined it, the lie about Him.
This lie seems to counterfeit the eternal mind that is God. It seems
to pose as a creative principle, and to simulate the powers and
attributes of God himself. It assumes to create its universe of
matter, the direct opposite of the spiritual universe. And, likewise,
it a