Page 174 - erewhon

things which I ought to have remembered, I answered that
if a person could not be kept straight by these things, there
was nothing that could straighten him, and that if he were
not ruled by the love and fear of men whom he had seen,
neither would he be so by that of the gods whom he had
not seen.
At one time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect
who believed, after a fashion, in the immortality of the soul
and the resurrection from the dead; they taught that those
who had been born with feeble and diseased bodies and
had passed their lives in ailing, would be tortured eternal-
ly hereafter; but that those who had been born strong and
healthy and handsome would be rewarded for ever and ever.
Of moral qualities or conduct they made no mention.
Bad as this was, it was a step in advance, inasmuch as
they did hold out a future state of some sort, and I was
shocked to find that for the most part they met with oppo-
sition, on the score that their doctrine was based upon no
sort of foundation, also that it was immoral in its tendency,
and not to be desired by any reasonable beings.
When I asked how it could be immoral, I was answered,
that if firmly held, it would lead people to cheapen this pres-
ent life, making it appear to be an affair of only secondary
importance; that it would thus distract men’s minds from
the perfecting of this world’s economy, and was an im-
patient cutting, so to speak, of the Gordian knot of life’s
problems, whereby some people might gain present sat-
isfaction to themselves at the cost of infinite damage to
others; that the doctrine tended to encourage the poor in

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