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that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no lon-
ger believe that hope is an actual person?’ She shook her
head, and said that with men’s belief in the personality all
incentive to the reverence of the thing itself, as justice or
hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be ei-
ther just or hopeful again.
I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish
to do so. She deferred to me in most things, but she never
shrank from maintaining her opinions if they were put in
question; nor does she to this day abate one jot of her be-
lief in the religion of her childhood, though in compliance
with my repeated entreaties she has allowed herself to be
baptized into the English Church. She has, however, made a
gloss upon her original faith to the effect that her baby and
I are the only human beings exempt from the vengeance
of the deities for not believing in their personality. She is
quite clear that we are exempted. She should never have so
strong a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come about
she does not know, neither does she wish to know; there are
things which it is better not to know and this is one of them;
but when I tell her that I believe in her deities as much as
she does—and that it is a difference about words, not things,
she becomes silent with a slight emphasis.
I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she
asked me what I should think if she were to tell me that my
God, whose nature and attributes I had been explaining to
her, was but the expression for man’s highest conception of
goodness, wisdom, and power; that in order to generate a
more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought,

1 Erewhon