had expressed. A
tremendous opportunity now presented. Already the foundation had been
well laid--but not by earthly hands. His task was to build upon it;
and, as he did so, to learn himself. He had never before realized more
than faintly the awful power for good or evil which a parent wields
over a child. He had no more than the slightest conception of the
mighty problem of child-education. And now Carmen herself had shown
him that real education must be reared upon a foundation _wholly
spiritual_. Yet this, he knew, was just what the world's educators did
not do. He could see now how in the world the religious instinct of
the child is early quenched, smothered into complete or partial
extinction beneath the false tutelage of parents and teachers, to whom
years and adult stature are synonymous with wisdom, and who themselves
have learned to see the universe only through the opaque lenses of
matter and chance.

"If children were not falsely educated to know all manner of evil," he
mused, "what spiritual powers might they not develop in adult life,
powers that are as yet not even imagined! But their primitive
religious instinct is regarded by the worldly-wise parent as but a
part of the infant existence, which must soon give place to the more
solid and real beliefs and opinions which the world in general regards
as established and conventional, even though their end is death. And
so they teach their children to make evil real, even while admonishing
them to protect themselves against it and eventually so to rise as to
overcome it, little realizing that the carnal belief of the reality of
evil which a child is taught to accept permeates its pure thought like
an insidious poison, and becomes externalized in the conventional
routine existence of mind in matter, soul in body, a few brief years
of mingled good and evil, and then darkness--the end here certain; the
future life a vague, impossible conjecture."

Jose determined that Carmen's education should be spiritual, largely
because he knew, constituted as she was, it could not well be
otherwise. And he resolved that from his teachings she should glean
nothing but happiness, naught but good. With his own past as a
continual warning, he vowed first that never should the mental germ of
fear be planted within this child's mind. He himself had cringed like
a coward before it all his desolate life. And so his conduct had been
consistently slavish, specious, and his thought st