"Yes," she said simply.

"And you, Ned?"

Haynerd blinked for a few moments, like an owl in the light. But then, as a comprehension of Hitt's plan dawned upon his waking thought, he straightened up.

"Buy the Express! Make a real paper of it! A--but Ames?"

"He can't touch us! The clientele of the Express will not be made up of his puppets! Our paper will be for the people!"

"But--your University work, Hitt?"

"I give my last lecture next week."

"And you, Carmen?"

"I was only biding my time," she replied gently. "This is a real call.

And my answer is: Here am I."

Tears began to trickle slowly down Haynerd's cheeks, as the tension in his nerves slackened. He rose and seized the hands of his two friends.

"Hitt," he said, in a choking voice, "I--I said I was a fool. But that fellow's dead now. The real man has waked up, and--well, what are you standing there for, you great idiot? Go and call up Carlson!"

Again that evening the little group sat about the table in the dining room of the Beaubien cottage. But only the three most directly concerned, and the Beaubien, knew that the owner of the Express had received that afternoon an offer for the purchase of his newspaper, and that he had been given twenty-four hours in which to accept it.

Doctor Morton was again present; and beside him sat his lifelong friend and jousting-mate, the very Reverend Patterson Moore. Hitt took the floor, and began speaking low and earnestly.

"We must remember," he said, "in conjunction with what we have deduced regarding the infinite creative mind and its manifestations, that we mortals in our daily mundane existence deal only and always with phenomena, with appearances, with effects, and never with ultimate causes. And so all our material knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only. Of the ultimate essence of things, the human mind knows nothing. All of its knowledge is relative. A phenomenon may be so-and-so with regard to another; but that either is absolute truth we can not affirm. And yet--mark this well--as Spencer says, 'Every one of the arguments by which the relativity of our knowledge is demonstrated distinctly postulates the positive existence of something beyond the relative.'"

"And just what does that mean?" asked Miss Wall.

"It is a primitive statement of what is sometimes called the 'Theory of suppositional opposites'", replied Hitt. "It means that to every reality there is the corresponding unreality. For every truth there may be postulated the supposition. We can not, as the great philosopher says, conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a reality of which they are appearances. He further amplifies this by saying that 'every positive notion--the concept of a thing by what it is--suggests a negative notion--the concept of a thing by what it is not. But, though these mutually suggest each other, _the positive alone is real_.' Most momentous language, that! For, interpreted, it means: we must deny the seeming, or that which appears to human sense, in order to see that which is real."

"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Miss Wall, glancing about to note the effect of the speaker's words on the others.

But Carmen nodded her thorough agreement, and added: "Did not Jesus say that we must deny ourselves? Deny which self? Why, the self that appears to us, the matter-man, the dust-man, the man of the second chapter of Genesis. We must deny his reality, and know that he is nothing but a mental concept, formed out of suppositional thought, out of dust-thought. And that is material thought."

"Undoubtedly correct," said Hitt, turning to Carmen. "But, before we consider the astonishing teachings of Jesus, let us sum up the conclusions of philosophy. To begin with, then, there is a First Cause, omnipotent and omnipresent, and of very necessity perfect. That Cause lies back of all the phenomena of life; and, because of its real existence, there arises the suppositional existence of its opposite, its negative, so to speak, which is unreal. The phenomena of human existence have to do _only_ with the suppositional existence of the great First Cause's opposite. They are a reflection of that supposition. Hence all human knowledge of an external world is but phenomenal, and consists of appearances which have no more real substance than have shadows. _We, as mortals, know but the shadowy, phenomenal existence._ _We do not know reality._ _Therefore, our knowledge is not real knowledge, but supposition._

"Now," he went on hastily, for he saw an expression of protest on Reverend Moore's face, "we are more or less familiar with a phenomenal existence, with appearances, with effects; and our knowledge of these is entirely mental. We see all things as thought. These thoughts, such as feeling, seeing, hearing, and so on, we ignorantly attribute to the five physical senses. This is what Ruskin calls the 'pathetic fallacy.' And because we do so, we find ourselves absolutely dependent upon these senses--in belief. Moreover, quoting Spencer again, only the absolutely real is the absolutely persistent, or enduring. Truth, for example. The truth of the multiplication table will endure eternally. It is real. But is it any whit material?"

"No," admitted Miss Wall, speaking for the others.

"And, as regards material objects which we seem to see and touch,"

went on Hitt, "we appear to see solidity and hardness, and we conceive as real objects what are only the mental signs or indications of objects. Remember, matter does not and can not get into the mind. Only thoughts and ideas enter our mentalities. We see our _thoughts_ of hardness, solidity, and so on; and these thoughts point to something that is real. That _something_ is--what? I repeat: _the ideas of the infinite creative Mind_. The thoughts of size, shape, hardness, and so on, which we group together and call material chairs, trees, mountains, and other objects, are but 'relative realities,' pointing to the absolute reality, infinite mind and its eternal ideas and thoughts."

He paused again for comments. But all seemed absorbed in his statements. Then he resumed:

"Our concept of matter, which is now proven to be but a mental concept, built up out of false thought, points to _mind_ as the real substance. Our concept of measurable s.p.a.ce and distance is the direct opposite of the great truth that infinite mind is ever-present. Our concept of time is the opposite of infinity. It is but human limitation. Age is the opposite of eternity--and the old-age thought brings extinction. So, _to every reality there is the corresponding unreality_. The opposite of good is evil. If the infinite creative mind is good--and we saw that by very necessity it _must_ be so--then evil becomes an awful unreality, and is real only to the false thought which entertains or holds it. If life is real--and infinite mind must itself be life--then death becomes the opposite unreality. And, as Jesus said, it can be overcome. But were it real, _no power_, _divine or human_, _could ever overcome or destroy it_!"

"Seems to me," remarked Haynerd dryly, "that our study so far simply goes to show, as Burke puts it, 'what shadows we are and what shadows we pursue.'"

Hitt smiled. "When the world humiliates itself to the point that it will accept that, my friend," he said, "then it will become receptive to truth.

"But now let us go a little further," he went on. "The great Lamarck voiced a mighty fact when he said, 'Function precedes structure.' For by that we mean that the egg did not produce the bird, but the bird the egg. The world seems about to pa.s.s from the very foolish belief that physical structure is the cause of life, to the great fact that a _sense_ of life produces the physical structure. The former crude belief enslaved man to his body. The latter tends to free him from such slavery."

"You see, Doctor," interrupted Carmen, "the brain which you were cutting up the other day did not make poor Yorick's mind and thought, but his mind made the brain."

The doctor smiled and shook a warning finger at the girl.

"The body," resumed Hitt, "is a manifestation of the human mind's activity. What const.i.tutes the difference between a bird and a steam engine? This, in part: the engine is made by human hands from without; the bird makes itself, that is, its body, from within. So it is with the human body. But the ignorant human mind--ignorant _per se_--falls a slave to its own creation, the mental concept which it calls its physical body, and which it pampers and pets and loves, until it can cling to it no longer, because the mental concept, not being based on any real principle, is forced to pa.s.s away, having nothing but false thought to sustain it."

"But now," interposed Haynerd, who was again waxing impatient, "just what is the practical application of all this abstruse reasoning?"

"The very greatest imaginable, my friend," replied Hitt. "A real thing is real forever. And so matter can not become non-existent _unless it is already nothing_! The world is beginning to recognize the tremendous fact that from nothing nothing can be made. Very well, since the law of the conservation of energy seems to be established as regards energy _in toto_, why, we must conclude that there is no such thing as _annihilation_. And that means that _there is no such thing as absolute creation_! Whatever is real has always existed. The shadow never was real, and does not exist. And so creation becomes unfolding, or revelation, or development, of what already exists, and has always existed, and always will exist. Therefore, if matter, and all it includes as concomitants, evil, sin, sickness, accident, chance, lack, and death, is based upon unreal, false thought, then it can all be removed, put out of consciousness, by a knowledge of truth and a reversal of our accustomed human thought-processes."

"And that," said Carmen, "is salvation. It is based on righteousness, which is right-thinking, thinking true thoughts, and thinking truly."

"And knowing," added Hitt, "that evil, including matter, is the suppositional opposite of truth. The doctrine of materialism has been utterly disproved even by the physicists themselves. For physicists have at last agreed that inertia is the great essential property of matter. That is, matter is not a cause, but an effect. It does not operate, but is operated upon. It is not a law-giver, but is subject to the human mind's so-called laws concerning it. It of itself is utterly without life or intelligence.

"Very good," he continued. "Now Spencer said that matter was a manifestation of an underlying power or force. Physicists tell us that matter is made of electricity, that it is an electrical phenomenon, and that the ultimate const.i.tuent of matter is the electron. The electron is said by some to be made up of superimposed layers of positive and negative electricity, and by others to be made up of only negative charges. I rather prefer the latter view, for if composed of only negative electricity it is more truly a negation. Matter is the _negative_ of real substance. It is a sort of negative truth.

"Now electricity is a form of energy. Hence matter is a form of energy also. But our comprehension of it is _wholly mental_. Energy is mental. The only real energy there is or can be is the energy of the infinite mind we call G.o.d. This the human mind copies, or imitates, by reason of what has been called 'the law of suppositional opposites,' already dwelt upon at some length. Everything manifests this so-called law. Electricity is both positive and negative.

Gravitation is regarded by some physicists as the negative aspect of radiation-pressure, the latter being the pressure supposed to be exerted by all material bodies upon one another. The third law of motion ill.u.s.trates this so-called law, for it states that action and reaction are equal and opposite. There can be no positive action without a resultant negative one. The truth has its lie. The divine mind, G.o.d, has His opposite in the communal human, or mortal, mind.

The latter is manifested by the so-called minds which we call mankind.

And from these so-called minds issue matter and material forms and bodies, with their so-called material laws.

"Yes, the material universe is running down. Stupendous fact! The entire human concept is running down. Matter, the human mental concept, is not eternally permanent. Neither, therefore, are its concomitants, sin and discord. Matter disintegrates and pa.s.ses away--out of human consciousness. The whole material universe--the so-called mortal-mind concept--is hastening to its death!"

"But as yet I think you have not given Mr. Haynerd the practical application which he asks," suggested Father Waite, as. .h.i.tt paused after his long exposition.

"I am now ready for that," replied Hitt. "We have said that the material is the relative. So all human knowledge is relative. But, that being so, we can go a step further and add that human error is likewise relative. And now--startling fact!--_it is absolutely impossible to really know error_!"

"Why--!" burst from the incredulous Miss Wall.

"Well?" said Hitt, turning to her. "Can you know that two plus two equals seven?"

"N--no."

"Let me make this statement of truth: nothing can be known definitely except as it is explained by the principle which governs it. Now what principle governs an error, whether that error be in music, mathematics, or life conduct?"

There was no reply to the question.

"Very well," continued Hitt. "Evil can not be really known. And that is why G.o.d--infinite Mind--can not behold evil. And now, friends, I have come to the conclusion of a long series of deductions. If infinite mind is the cause and creator, that is, the revealer, of all that really exists, its suppositional opposite, its negative, must likewise simulate a creation, or revelation, or unfolding, for this opposite must of very necessity pose as a creative principle. It must simulate all the powers and attributes of the infinite creative mind.

If the creative mind gave rise to a spiritual universe and spiritual man, by which it expresses itself, then this suppositional opposite must present its universe and its man, opposite in every particular to the reality. _It is this sort of man and this sort of universe that we, as mortals, seem to see all about us, and that we refer to as human beings and the physical universe._ And yet, all that we see, feel, hear, smell, or taste is the false, suppositional thought that comes into our so-called mentalities, and by its suppositional activity there causes what we call consciousness or awareness of things."

"Then," said Father Waite, more to enunciate his own thought than to question the deduction, "what the human consciousness holds as knowledge is little more than belief and speculation, with no basis of truth, no underlying principle."

"Just so. And it brings out the fruits of such beliefs in discord, decay, and final dissolution, called death. For this human consciousness forms its own concept of a fleshly body, and a mind-and-matter man. It makes the laws which govern its body, and it causes its body to obey these false laws. Upon the quality of thought entering this human consciousness depend all the phenomena of earthly life and environment which the mortal experiences. The human consciousness, in other words, is a _self-centered ma.s.s of erroneous thought, utterly without any basis of real principle, but actively engaged in building up mental images, and forming and maintaining an environment in which it supposes itself to live_. _This false thought in the human consciousness forms into a false concept of man, and this is the soul-and-body man, the mind-and-matter man, which is called a human being, or a mortal._"