amped with the brand
of the counterfeit. He knew not how much longer he must struggle with
it. But he knew that, if he would progress, the warfare must go on,
until at length he should put it under his feet. His mind still bore
the almost ineradicable mold of the fear deeply graven into it by the
ignorant opinions, the worldly, material, unspiritual beliefs of his
dear but unwise parents. His life had been hedged with baleful shadows
because of it; and over every bright picture there hung its black
draping. As he looked back over the path along which he had come, he
could see every untoward event, every unhappiness and bitter
disappointment, as the externalization of fear in some form, the germ
of which had been early planted in the fertile soil of his plastic
brain. Without it he might have risen to towering heights. Under its
domination he had sunk until the swirling stream of life had eddied
him upon the desolate shores of Simiti. In the hands of the less
fearful he had been a puppet. In his own eyes he was a fear-shaped
manikin, the shadow of God's real man. The fear germ had multiplied
within him a billionfold, and in the abundant crop had yielded a
mental depression and deep-seated melancholy that had utterly stifled
his spirit and dried the marrow of his bones.

They were not pleasant, these thoughts. But now Jose could draw from
them something salutary, something definite to shape and guide his
work with Carmen. She, at least, should not grow up the slave of
fearsome opinions and beliefs born of dense ignorance. Nor should the
baseless figments of puerile religious systems find lodgment within
her clear thought. The fear element, upon which so much of so-called
Christian belief has been reared, and the damnable suggestions of hell
and purgatory, of unpardonable sin and endless suffering, the
stock-in-trade of poet, priest and prelate up to and overlapping our
present brighter day, should remain forever a closed volume to this
child, a book as wildly imaginative and as unacceptable as the fabled
travels of Maundeville.

"I believe," he would murmur to himself, as he strolled alone in the
dusk beside the limpid lake, "that if I could plant myself firmly on
the Scriptural statement that God is love, that He is good; and if I
could regard Him as infinite mind, while at the same time striving to
recognize no reality, no intelligence or life in things material, I
could eventually triumph over the whole false concept