its opposite in the human
consciousness. But Paul rose above it and saw its nothingness. Then
he cried: "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made
me free from the law of sin and death." He recognized the spiritual
law that Jesus employed; and with it he overcame the mesmerism of
the lie.

"To be a Christian, then," said Jose, "means not merely taking the
name of Christ, and, while morally opposing sin, succumbing to every
form of mesmerism that the lie about God exerts. No, it is infinitely
more! It means recognizing the nature of God and His Creation,
including Man, to be wholly spiritual--and the nature of the material
creation and mankind as their opposite, as mental concepts, existing
as false interpretations of the spiritual Universe and Man, and as
having their place only in the false human consciousness, which itself
is a mental activity concerned only with false thought, the
suppositional opposite of God's thought. It means taking this Truth,
this spiritual law, as we would take a mathematical rule or principle,
and with it overcoming sin, sickness, discord of every name and
nature, even to death itself. What, oh, what have so-called Christians
been doing these nearly two thousand years, that they have not ere
this worked out their salvation as Jesus directed them to do? Alas!
they have been mesmerized--simply mesmerized by the lie. The
millennium should have come long, long ago. It would come to-day if
the world would obey Jesus. But it will not come until it does obey
him."

Day after day, week after week, month after month, Jose delved and
toiled, studied and pondered. The books which he ordered through the
Empresa Alemania, and for which for some two months he waited in
trembling anticipation and fear lest they be lost in transit, finally
arrived. When Juan brought them up from Bodega Central, Jose could
have wept for joy. Except for the very few letters he had received at
rare intervals, these were the only messages that had penetrated the
isolation of Simiti from the outside world in the two long years of
his exile. His starving mind ravenously devoured them. They afforded
his first introduction to that fearlessly critical thought regarding
things religious which has swept across the world like a tidal wave,
and washed away so many of the bulwarks of superstition and ignorance
bred of fear of the unknown and supposedly unknowable.

And yet they were not really his first introduction to