Olmedo now saw plainly that God had as fully constituted him for marriage as any other man; that even his partial intercourse with woman had been the means of his greater soul-awakening; that it was an error to view God as a being who delighted in asceticism. On the contrary he rejoiced, and all nature showed it, in man’s innocent appropriation of all the sources of enjoyment and knowledge, created expressly for him. The feasting and sociality of Christ, his love for women and children and constant intercourse with them, his generous disregard of the letter of the law, all spoke to him as they never had before. He was satisfied that man was right only, in the degree that he exercised all his faculties in the direction for which they were created; that to deny some to the intent to exalt others, was a fatal mistake. Harmony proceeded solely from the mutual and free action of all, in accordance with general principles which all nature except man instinctively recognized, but which to man were often perverted by the wantonness of Reason. In demanding to be his sole guide, Reason claimed too much. There were lessons to be learned through his affection as well as through his intellect. The more childlike he became, the more direct was his intercourse with God. Nature, children, and, above all, the heart of woman had become to him new sources of inspiration. There was then a Holy Book in all created things. Words of life could be read alike in the phenomena of nature, the sports of innocence, and the warm affections of humanity. Revelation was not confined to the printed page.
Such thoughts as these would have brought him to the stake in Spain. In the dull routine of convent-life, they probably would never have been awakened. Here he was in a new world. The church, as a human institution, was himself. There was no official authority superior to his own; no guide above his own reason or conscience. Naturally free and inquiring, how could it be otherwise than that the lessons of his new life should be felt in his soul. He saw that hierarchies were not indispensable roads to heaven. He even dimly imagined the time when each man should be again his own priest, and the intercourse between God and his children be direct as it once was. But I cannot follow him through all the foreshowings of his newly aroused religious aspirations. The Age and his education still had deep hold upon him. Fain would he now, however, redeem himself a man.