"Now I know. These
differences are nothing to me, and though I was curious to know what
they were, they are not worth talking about, because, as I know, all
religions are false."
"What did he mean - how did he know?" I asked, very much surprised.
"The priests tell us," he replied, "that we must believe and live a
religious life in this world to be saved. Your priests tell you the
same, and as there is no other world and we have no souls, all they
say must be false. You see all this with your eyes," he continued,
waving his hands to indicate the whole visible world. "And when you
shut them or go blind you see no more. It is the same with our brains.
We think of a thousand things and remember, and when the brain decays
we forget everything, and we die, and everything dies with us. Have
not the cattle eyes to see and brains to think and remember too? And
when they die no priest tells us that they have a soul and have to go
to purgatory, or wherever he likes to send them. Now, in return for
what you told me, I've told you something you didn't know."
It came as a great shock to me to hear this. Hitherto I had thought
that what was wrong with our native friends was that they believed too
much, and this man - this good honest old gaucho we all respected -
believed nothing! I tried to argue with him and told him he had said a
dreadful thing, since every one knew in his heart that he had an
immortal soul and had to be judged after death. He had distressed and
even frightened me, but he went on calmly smoking and appeared not to
be listening to me, and as he refused to speak I at last burst out:
"How do you know? Why do you say you know?"
At last he spoke. "Listen. I was once a boy too, and I know that a boy
of fourteen can understand things as well as a man. I was an only
child, and my mother was a widow, and I was more than all the world to
her, and she was more than everything else to me. We were alone
together in the world - we two. Then she died, and what her loss was to
me - how can I say it? - how could you understand? And after she was
taken away and buried, I said: 'She is not dead, and wherever she now
is, in heaven or in purgatory, or in the sun, she will remember and
come to me and comfort me.' When it was dark I went out alone and sat
at the end of the house, and spent hours waiting for her. 'She will
surely come,' I said, 'but I don't know whether I shall see her or
not. Perhaps it will be just a whisper in my ear, perhaps a touch of
her hand on mine, but I shall know that she is with me.' And at last,
worn out with waiting and watching, I went to my bed and said she will
come to-morrow. And the next night and the next it was the same.
Sometimes I would go up the ladder, always standing against the gable
so that one could go up, and standing on the roof, look out over the
plain and see where our horses were grazing. There I would sit or lie
on the thatch for hours. And I would cry: 'Come to me, my mother! I
cannot live without you! Come soon-come soon, before I die of a broken
heart!' That was my cry every night, until worn out with my vigil I
would go back to my room. And she never came, and at last I knew that
she was dead and that we were separated for ever - that there is no
life after death."
His story pierced me to the heart, and without another word I left
him, but I succeeded in making myself believe that grief for his
mother had made him mad, that as a boy he had got these delusions in
his mind and had kept them all his life. Now this recollection haunted
me. Then one day, with my mind in this troubled state, in reading
George Combo's Physiology I came on a passage in which the question of
the desire for immortality is discussed, his contention being that it
is not universal, and as a proof of this he affirms that he himself
had no such desire.
This came as a great shock to me, since up to the moment of reading it
I had in my ignorance taken It for granted that the desire is inherent
in every human being from the dawn of consciousness to the end of
life, that it is our chief desire, and is an instinct of the soul like
that physical instinct of the migratory bird which calls it annually
from the most distant regions back to its natal home. I had also taken
it for granted that our hope of immortality, or rather our belief in
it, was founded on this same passion in us and in its universality.
The fact that there were those who had no such desire was sufficient
to show that it was no spiritual instinct or not of divine origin.
There were many more shocks of this kind - when I go back in memory to
that sad time, it seems almost incredible to me that that poor
doubtful faith in revealed religion still survived, and that the
struggle still went on, but go on it certainly did.
To many of my readers, to all who have interested themselves in the
history of religion and its effect on individual minds - its
psychology - all I have written concerning my mental condition at that
period, will come as a twice-told tale, since thousands and millions
of men have undergone similar experiences and have related them in
numberless books.
