Page 173 - erewhon

them, I cannot feel sanguine that much good would be ar-
rived at. Still the attempt is worth making, and the worst
danger to the missionaries themselves would be that of be-
ing sent to the hospital where Chowbok would have been
sent had he come with me into Erewhon.
Taking then their religious opinions as a whole, I must
own that the Erewhonians are superstitious, on account of
the views which they hold of their professed gods, and their
entirely anomalous and inexplicable worship of Ydgrun, a
worship at once the most powerful, yet most devoid of for-
malism, that I ever met with; but in practice things worked
better than might have been expected, and the conflicting
claims of Ydgrun and the gods were arranged by unwritten
compromises (for the most part in Ydgrun’s favour), which
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred were very well un-
derstood.
I could not conceive why they should not openly acknowl-
edge high Ydgrunism, and discard the objective personality
of hope, justice, &c.; but whenever I so much as hinted at
this, I found that I was on dangerous ground. They would
never have it; returning constantly to the assertion that
ages ago the divinities were frequently seen, and that the
moment their personality was disbelieved in, men would
leave off practising even those ordinary virtues which the
common experience of mankind has agreed on as being the
greatest secret of happiness. ‘Who ever heard,’ they asked,
indignantly, ‘of such things as kindly training, a good ex-
ample, and an enlightened regard to one’s own welfare,
being able to keep men straight?’ In my hurry, forgetting

1 Erewhon