Page 164 - erewhon

the man got into the water by accident or on purpose,
whether through the attempt to save a child or through pre-
sumptuous contempt of the air-god, the air-god will kill
him, unless he keeps his head high enough out of the water,
and thus gives the air-god his due.
This with regard to the deities who manage physical af-
fairs. Over and above these they personify hope, fear, love,
and so forth, giving them temples and priests, and carving
likenesses of them in stone, which they verily believe to be
faithful representations of living beings who are only not
human in being more than human. If any one denies the
objective existence of these divinities, and says that there
is really no such being as a beautiful woman called Justice,
with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales, positively living
and moving in a remote and ethereal region, but that jus-
tice is only the personified expression of certain modes of
human thought and action—they say that he denies the ex-
istence of justice in denying her personality, and that he is
a wanton disturber of men’s religious convictions. They de-
test nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher
spiritual conceptions of the deities whom they profess to
worship. Arowhena and I had a pitched battle on this point,
and should have had many more but for my prudence in al-
lowing her to get the better of me.
I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own
position for she returned more than once to the subject.
‘Can you not see,’ I had exclaimed, ‘that the fact of justice
being admirable will not be affected by the absence of a be-
lief in her being also a living agent? Can you really think

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