really taken this course herself,
as if led thereto by a power beyond them both.

And so he watched her, and sought to learn from her as from Christ's
own loving and obedient disciple. It was because of his obedience to
God that Jesus was able to "prove" Him in the mighty works which we
call miracles. He said, "If any man will do His will, he shall know of
the doctrine, whether it be of God." Plain enough, indeed! And Carmen
did do His will; she kept the very first Commandment; she walked by
faith, and not by the sight of the human senses. She had been called
an "_hada_," a witch, by the dull-witted folk of Simiti; and some day
it would be told that she had a devil. But the Master had borne the
same ignominy. And so has every pioneer in Truth, who has dared to lay
the axe at the roots of undemonstrable orthodox belief and entrenched
human error.

Jose often trembled for the child when he thought of the probable
reception that awaited her in the world without, in case she ever
left Simiti. Would her supreme confidence in good ever be weakened by
an opposite belief in evil? Would her glorious faith ever be
neutralized or counterbalanced by faith in a power opposed to God? He
wondered. And sometimes in the fits of abstraction resulting from
these thoughts, the girl would steal up to him and softly whisper,
"Why, Padre, are you trying to make two and two equal seven?" Then he
would laugh with her, and remember how from her algebraic work she had
looked up one day and exclaimed, "Padre--why, all evil can be reduced
to a common denominator, too--_and it is zero_!"

As recreation from the task of retranslating his Greek Testament, Jose
often read to Carmen portions from the various books of the Bible, or
told her the old sacred stories that children so love to hear. But
Carmen's incisive thought cut deep into them, and Jose generally found
himself hanging upon the naive interpretations of this young girl.
When, after reading aloud the two opposing accounts of the Creation,
as given in the first and second chapters of Genesis, she asked, "But,
Padre, why did God change His mind after He made people and gave them
dominion over everything?" Jose was obliged to say that God had not
made a mistake, and then gone back afterward to rectify it; that the
account of the Creation, as given in Genesis, was not His, but was a
record of the dawning upon the human thought of the idea of the
spiritual Creation; that the "mist" which went