At the mention of religion the timid lad at once became passionate, engrossed--nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of somber reticence had settled over him, he had been impressed with the majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, treading the heaving billows through the thick gloom, saved it at length from destruction. The hungry lad began to question his parents incessantly regarding the things of the spirit. His teachers in the parochial school he plied with queries which they could not meet. Day after day, while other boys of his tender age romped in the street, he would steal into the great Cathedral and stand, pathetically solitary, before the statues of the Christ and the Virgin Mary, yearning over the problems with which his childish thought was struggling, and the questions to which no one could return satisfying replies. Here again the boy seemed to manifest in exaggerated form the reversed characteristics of the old _Conquistador_. But, unlike that of the pious Juan, the mind of the little Josè was not so simple as to permit it to accept without remonstrance the tenets of his family's faith. Blind acceptance of any teaching, religious or secular, early became quite impossible to him. This entailed many an hour of suffering to the lad, and brought down upon his little head severe punishments from his preceptors and parents. But in vain they admonished and threatened. The child demanded proofs; and if proofs were not at hand, his acceptance of the mooted teaching was but tentative, generally only an outward yielding to his beloved mother's inexorable insistence. Many the test papers he returned to his teachers whereon he had written in answer to the questions set, "I am taught to reply thus; but in my heart I do not believe it." Vainly the teachers appealed to his parents. Futilely the latter pleaded and punished. The placid receptiveness of the Rincón mind, which for more than three hundred years had normally performed its absorptive functions and imbibed the doctrines of its accepted and established human authorities, without a trace of the heresy of suspecting their genuineness, had at last experienced a reversal. True, the boy had been born in the early hours of nineteenth century doubt and religious skepticism. The so-called scientific spirit, buried for ages beneath the _débris_ of human conjecture, was painfully emerging and preening its wings for flight. The "higher criticism" was nascent, and ancient