Limanora

CHAPTER XIII
RELIGION

AFTER a few days’ reflection and observation, I felt a change in the spirit of the people. There was less of that serenity which had struck me so often as one of the distinctive characteristics of themselves and their actions. Every family seemed to hurry in its efforts at development and the pace of their advance might almost be called feverish now. This was especially the case with all who were engaged in the more spiritual investigations into the nature of the cosmos. Next to them in increase of eagerness and enthusiasm came the astronomical families, the astrobiological, and all whose researches bore upon stellar conditions and interstellar migration. The gaze of the whole race was more distinctly outwards and extra-terrestrial.

I had conjectured the cause of this acceleration and impetuosity and soon definitely knew it to be the result of our expedition to the south and the reports we brought back. The elders on considering them saw that the safety of the island as a resting-place and arena for their progress was not to be depended on for many generations more. The increase in the rate of subsidence of their old home meant a transference of the destructive power of the subterranean fires to the other end of the ancient fissure within a measurable period. The volcanic vents on the antarctic coast must be closed beneath the ocean before many centuries were over; and the rushing waters in quenching their fires would find their way in uncontrollable steam towards the weakest point of the crust, which they knew to be their own archipelago. Ere many generations could come and go this terrestrial home of the race would be blown to dust, and new lands would appear at some other point on the line of fissure.

Where could they settle on the round of the earth? There was no land except their old home to the south isolated enough to admit of their following up their ideals. All the remote islands in other oceans were already fully occupied, and were impracticable for them unless at the sacrifice of human life, a condition that would outrage their whole idea of development. The globe was closed for them except the region of everlasting ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that too might at any moment flash into dust before the explosive forces beneath the crust. The alternative of seeking a home on another star had seemed to them the only one for many generations, and they had been preparing for it by inventions that would enable them to float clear of the terrestrial atmosphere for many centuries, and by explorations in interstellar space. But many discoveries and thoughts had thrown a new light upon this stellar migration. They would have to exist in their circumscribed faleenas as they travelled through the ether for many generations of even their long lives, and these ships would be their cradle and their tomb. They would have to resign for many centuries the conquests of the elements and of the forces of nature, that they had achieved in Limanora. The broad movement which these past ages of history had given to their life, would be narrowed into a space no larger than one chamber of their own mansions. They would live imprisoned, and their imprisonment would lay its brand upon their natures and still more upon the natures of their descendants. The proximity of so many in so small a space would breed physical and, still worse, spiritual disease, that would haunt their posterity for generations after they should settle in their new stellar abode. Their offspring would have the habits and ideas of the savage reared in the wigwam of the rover or the hut of the slave. Even if they could achieve individual flight through the ether, they would have to keep close to their storeships and return every few minutes to the exhausted atmosphere of their swiftwinging faleenas.

If every condition of their interstellar voyage were the same as their life in their own Limanora, what disappointments might not they encounter in their comparative ignorance of the biology of the heavens? Would not most stars that were fit to be inhabited be already choked with life and life at a different stage from that they had attained? If they struck upon a lower grade of existence it would be useless to attempt to raise it, and contrary to their own morality to obliterate it. If they met with a higher type of being, they would be repulsed by it as likely to degrade it. It would be a wretched existence to lead a life of interstellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seeking a star whereon they might rest the sole of their foot. Not more than one world in each system could be at the stage that would fit their life-evolution; most stars would be too young and fierily crude or too old and exhausted to give them the conditions they sought for. In many the life they would encounter would shock and repel them by its monstrosity. What was to hinder some such gigantic form as, the Leomo knew, had existed on the earth in its earlier geological ages, some tremendous winged saurian, having the place on one or more of the stars they visited that man held upon earth? It only meant the development of a brain proportionate to the hugeness of the bulk, and some swiftly moving, deft, and adaptable limb, like the human hand, to give it complete dominance over all the forms of life around it. The elephant needed only the mechanical faculty of the beaver or of the ant to outstrip man in the struggle of life; he had the delicate manipulator in his trunk, he had the long life, and he had the capacity of skull to transform him into the dominant race of the earth. In order to the mastery of his conditions, he had only to make the step from using anything that came ready to his trunk as a weapon into shaping it to his will. Circumstances, accidents, opportunities, pilot the evolution of life upon a world, and the accidental condition of an element or an energy or a locality might have transformed some terrific monster into the master of the first star they visited. It was merely a matter of more or less intricate convolutions of the brain. But perhaps the most terrible thing of all would be to land on a world whose inhabitants had developed the purely intellectual faculties and the section of the brain corresponding to them, at the expense of the nervous centres that have to do with the control of the passions and with the subordination of the animal nature; what a horror it would be to find a star full of Calibans with more than human cunning, and none of human emotion or morality!

The thought of chances like these gave them pause in their migratorial quest. They began to feel that even life amongst the ruder of their fellow-men might be better than landing amongst monsters unstirred by pity or compassion, reverence or tenderness for highly developed life, to whom bloodshed was nothing. It was true that there were in most nations men who were so constituted. But they were, except when they got the command of huge armies and became conquerors, bridled by fear of the punishments that the laws of the country meted out to criminals. It was better to live in proximity to beings amongst whom this moral and emotional neutrality is an exception, than in a world filled with such monsters. Perchance, when their island-home was shattered to dust, their true path lay along the surface of their own globe. They might settle on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain, round whose feet lay untainted tribes of primitive savages; there they might preserve their isolation as perfectly as in Limanora by a hedge of fear around them, which their exceptional power over the forces of nature should forge.

But they knew that before many ages could pass civilised man would penetrate amongst the awed tribes with his potent weapons and his unscrupulous cunning; then would they be unable to avoid bloodshed, or hypocritical ambush, or diplomacy; ambition and hatred would enter in and turn their paradise into a hell. On the whole, they inclined to the other alternative that lay before them when the great catastrophe came; that is, to let it do its worst on their physical or lower elements. Out of their shattered bodies would rise the energy of their systems to follow its career of development untrammelled by any slow-moving matter that was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sudden as that, death under any circumstances or conditions, was no stop or misfortune to the highest that was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve migration into the interstellar spaces. As it was, they were narrowed and localised in their development, thought (the higher thought) alone finding its way unchecked to any point or sphere in the cosmos. At death they would all be freed from the almost vegetative functions of human existence; they would be released from the prison of locality and their whole being would have the ease of thought in winging from infinity to infinity, and in disregarding the limitations of time and space. Together the whole of their race might find coalescence if not companionship in following out their career of development, unburdened by alliance with a lower type of energy, and in more swiftly attaining a higher and higher goal in the scale of energies.

When this conclusion had been reached by the consciousness of the people, the old serenity returned to them. They were ready to meet whatever came, not caring whether their ascent through the grades of being was trammelled by terrestrial forms of energy or set free in the infinities of ether. But I dimly felt that there was a sublime looking upwards in all they did or said added to their former serenity that transformed it into what approached to the noblest forms of devotional ecstasy I had seen amongst men. They never allowed themselves to fall into the moulds of thought that his bodily and terrestrial needs so freely supply to man. Though recognising the practical demands of the physical nature, they satisfied and then dismissed them as rapidly as was possible; and with all their marvellous machinery and inventions and their accumulation of power, the time occupied in this satisfaction was so abbreviated as to be scarcely noticeable in the labyrinth of daily pursuits.

I had been greatly puzzled during my long period of training to see no trace of religious worship in this noble race. Growing up with the instinct in me that of all manifestations of human possibilities religion was the most sublime, yet I had come to know before I left Europe how degraded, gross, and foul even a lofty-minded religion might become. But the best men and women I had known there had ever been stirred with the spirit of religious reverence and love. I could not account for these, the noblest and ablest beings I had seen on earth, ignoring the claims of what is the highest of all, and I watched eagerly for any indication of acts or moods of worship. Early in my residence on the island I had discovered that there were no temples and no priests; that was patent to the most casual glance of the stranger. Amongst all their public buildings there was none that could be taken as devoted to the worship of a deity, and there was no family or caste or set of men whose chief functions were to superintend such a worship. But perhaps their religious acts were private or even secret and I was on the alert many years for any sign of such a thing in the house of my proparents or in that of Thyriel. Finally discovering nothing that could be construed even in the most distant way into a ceremonial attitude or word, I gradually abandoned any expectation of such a thing.

My attention was now aroused by the new halo around their serene acceptance of the conditions of life. There was rapture and there was longing in their halcyon view of the world; yet the rapture and the longing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and duties, never gave them the ennui of life that transport and passion generally entrain. They seemed to have the vision and the upward glance of the seer without his brooding and apartness. It was rather an intensification of their usual feelings and attitude to life. This was nearer than anything else I had experienced in Limanora to the unperturbed faith in a higher being and the yearning for proximity to him that I had witnessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for lack of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or decennial review the predominating interest was the theopathic side of human nature, and I discovered more of their views of religion in the few years preceding it than in all the decades I had spent amongst them.

So devotional did I think the magnetism which ran through the community, that I plucked up courage to ask about the religion. My question was dealt with in the calmest and most rational way possible amongst human beings. There was no immediate reply, except an elevation of the finger to the brow and then to the wide vault of the sky, but I was led to a part of Fialume I had not visited. It lay in a region of the valley that I had carefully avoided as full of gloom, and damp with the vapour of a tumbling waterfall; I had never noticed any one enter it, and my curiosity had never been awakened about it.

Here were stored the records that illustrated the evolution of religion, records made by light, sound, and magnetism. It was intensely interesting for me to see so complete a museum of the natural history of worship. Every faith in the world had its due place, fixed according to its inner spirit and development. So graphic was the map of the whole that in a moment I saw the common kinship of all, and the differentiating qualities that made one worship higher and more advanced than another. My guide flashed living pictures of the ceremonies of each, and then let me listen to the speeches and talks of the officiants and of many of the worshippers. The magnetographs struck into me the feelings that pervaded the masses in the temples, and those that filled the breast of the solitary priest or devotee during the most solemn and enthusiastic act of worship. I could feel how much or how little the religion introduced into the life of the people. Day after day I returned with eagerness to the sight and the study of this absorbing phase of human nature, and seemed to get to the very heart of every faith and its influence. The mere accidents of its history were felt to be non-essential; its inner development stood out as plainly as if written in letters of fire.

My guide did not need to teach me the lesson. I knew it as well as if I had learned it from infancy. I knew why there were no temples, no ceremonies, no hierophantic families, no outward sign of faith, amongst this far-seeing people. Their own early endeavours to purify and develop the faith handed down to them from their forefathers were there as vividly pictured as any faith from the world outside. They had had temples as splendid as any I have ever seen or heard described; their ceremonies were artistic, noble, and significant; their music was as nearly sublime as earthly music can be; and the priestly profession attracted many of the ablest and some of the best natures in the community by its princely salaries, drawn from the gifts of former ages of the faithful, and by its high prerogatives.

At first I wondered how it had been possible to uproot an institution that had evidently grown out of the most intimate instincts of the race. The higher dignitaries were so lordly and influential they might easily control even by their private alliances and social dominance the powers of the state; and the poorer hierophants had ingratiated themselves with the middle classes and proletariate, from whom they came. Reverence, fear, love, ambition, pride, self-interest, all the commoner emotions and passions of humanity, were engaged and intertwined with the worship. How could such a widely ramifying profession allow itself to be overthrown?

When the exilings were over, it was found that there was not a member of the priestly profession left on the island; nor was there anything of the wealth of the church, except the solid walls of the temples. The dignitaries and most of the transferable riches had found their way to Aleofane; the bulk of the poor clergy landed in Tirralaria, and smaller bands drifted away to smaller islands like Coxuria, establishing there communities marked by some extreme eccentricity of faith. All the vestments and altars and ornaments of the temples had vanished before the last expedition left the shores of Limanora; even the huge bells that had rung to service, and the baser metals for making the roofs water-tight, had disappeared. Nothing but the stones and mortar were left to indicate where the great faith of the past had housed itself. One or two expeditions even were seen to set out from Tirralaria and Aleofane to fetch the very temples away stone by stone. To prevent the cupidity of the exiles from wasting itself on futile attempts against the island, the edifices were tumbled into the sea, and helped to make the bastions which guarded the shores.

Having thus got rid of all the outward property and signs of their former worship, they had to count the cost and consider how they were to meet the situation. It had been inculcated by the officiants of the church for untold generations that all morality, and in fact all civilisation, would vanish with faith. Religion was the foundation of everything in life that was worth preserving, and most of the people trembled if any change were proposed in the national worship. They feared that the object of their devotion would withdraw the light of his countenance from them, should the slightest feature of it be modified. Even the scientific and cultured thought that religion acted as an excellent watchdog or policeman, keeping the uneducated within the bounds of the laws and traditions of the nation. Changes had crept in unobserved by the worshippers, and had been sanctified by time; then open proposals for change gave the shock and the alarm, and made the whole fabric seem to shake and totter. The unperceived changes were far greater and more revolutionary in their ultimate effect, for they were generally changes of degeneration which ended in decay and ruin. But everything that was deliberately intended to fit the old institution to the new times was looked on with horror, as sacrilege never to be forgiven.

It was therefore with a certain tremor that they demolished the ancient temples, and put their stones to new and seemingly secular uses. But once the transformation was accomplished and no great catastrophe followed, even the less bold gathered courage. As time went on and the old faith was forgotten and no definite new creed took its place, it began to be felt that the terror of religious change and the belief that religion alone gave the guaranty of all morality and civilisation were alike baseless. After a decade or two, when they began to reflect on their past and analyse their new states of mind and public feeling, they discovered the most striking effect of this abeyance of ecclesiasticism to be the attainment of the ideal of all true religion. Into their very life had soaked the inner spirit of devotion. Every act was done with a reference to something far higher than itself, to which the doer looked up with reverence yet with the sense of its possible attainment in the future. Every piece of conduct, every item of character was moulded as if for all time. All their work they laboured at with an earnestness, enthusiasm, and care that evinced the consciousness of its everlasting issues. In short, they found that the surest way to exclude religion from the life was to assign to it a special section of time, a special profession, and special edifices. These acted as a conduit that drew it from the true business of existence. Men and women came to feel that, these once being set apart, all was done that could be done for the object of their worship, and that the rest of their life upon earth could be given up to whatsoever pleased them, be it irreligious, wicked, or even vile. The religious section of their lives threw its consecrating and protecting shadow over the worst they might do or say or think. Thus came about the strange paradox that the vilest of criminals were often the most devoted to religion when they went into the temples. The specialisation of what should belong to the whole life and conduct lessens its value. If there is a particular channel for religion it will be confined to that channel, except in rare seasons of enthusiasm, when it floods the adjacent regions and does universal havoc.

Formerly the most religious had been the least trustworthy in the ordinary business of life, and they had not been able to understand why; for the deity they worshipped was a compound of all the noblest virtues they could conceive, and honesty and truth and constancy were three of these. Now they perceived that, having given a tithe of their civilisation and energy to the object of their worship, they had shut him and the virtues he embodied out from the rest; he had no claim on that. It was vain for the creed or the priests to insist that the faith should be carried into the life, as long as there was a special part of life dedicated to it. Once the pales were down, and there was no distinction between time and time, between place and place, and between act and act, the nesting-place of hypocrisy disappeared. Every day was sacred; every place was a sanctuary; every act was holy; every moment of their life, every action was a prayer. For they were ever looking upwards and forwards towards the ideal and believed that the noblest reverence they could pay to the cosmos and to the presiding spirit of the cosmos was to raise their own natures ever higher in the cosmic scale. Everything that withdrew them from this cultivation of the special plot assigned to them in the universe, from the development of their better selves, was delaying the true purpose of existence; even acts of reverence and ceremonies of faith were but waste of cosmic energy. As long as they kept raising their struggle for existence to a higher plane, so long were they truly reverencing the greatest being of all, the spirit that gave and was the palpitating life of the cosmos.

They acknowledged that every religion in its origin was a recognition of unknown elements or beings far above the plane of the worshippers. But it rapidly degenerated into mere parasitism upon its deity. The more spiritual faiths in their earlier stages express the yearning for higher scales of being in true efforts to bring the life of the worshipper nearer to that of the worshipped. But soon the curse of religion comes upon them; they try to include races on a lower plane than that of their first worshippers and moulders and to these they must adapt themselves; for it is the mass, the numbers that form the ultimate mould of a faith; the noble natures, for whom they originally came into being, are left neglected and undeveloped, and the whole worship goes lower and lower to fit the needs of the increasing numbers of converts.

Insignificant though the Limanorans felt themselves to be against the infinity of the cosmos, they refused to formulate their worship lest it should fall into parasitism, the source of most of the evil and retrogression in the universe. They knew that it was possible for the lower being to try to rise to the level of existence of the higher and worshipped, and, in advancing, to help his advance. But they had seen too much in history and in contemporary life of the symbiosis of worshippers becoming mere parasitism to trust themselves to anything definite and outward in religion. In daily intercourse the lower and weaker natures cling to the higher and stronger; and if they fail to reciprocate the benefit they receive, and cease to attempt to elevate themselves to the level of their hosts, then they suck the life-blood from them and degrade them. The same holds in religion. The mean worshippers (and the majority in mixed communities are mean) make no effort to better themselves; the higher ideal that they are taught to reverence as a god, they batten upon for favours; they pray to him and yearn for him, not that they may be like him but that he may be like them, and become their active and efficient partner in material things and their accomplice in their mean or evil deeds. The Limanorans conceived that all the higher beings of space struggle to keep clear of such parasitic religionists as the majority of men are. There is no road up the steep of being but by patient self-development through generations and generations. Almost all religions, after their early and enthusiastic stage, are royal roads that seem to lead to the heights of heaven, and are but descents to hell. They only delude men into thinking that there are other ways to divine happiness than that likeness to the divine nature which is to be attained by nothing but slow, gradual, inward change.

They had seen so much of the degeneration and immorality of faiths, not only in their own history but in the history of the world, that nothing would persuade them to formulate or define in words what they meant by religion at any stage of their development. For, once they had defined, there was a platform of self-opinion and self-interest to fight for, a nucleus of petrifaction. Rites and outward worship would follow, and a priesthood whose interest it would be to teach that what they profess as a creed is absolute truth. Right well the Limanorans knew how false such teaching is. No age can have a view of life that is not moulded by contemporaneous circumstances and capacity of thought and feeling, and the farther the people pass in time and spirit from the primitive age of the founders of their religion, the more stoutly will they uphold every word of the creed and every feature of the institution. Nothing but a sanguinary revolution will avail to undo the tragic knot with which the spirit of man has thus bound itself. However good for progress the enthusiasm of a faith might be in its early stage, it inevitably became the tomb of the human spirit. Occult explanations of statements that did not tally with acknowledged facts or laws were bound to appear, as soon as the mind of the people began to move and develop; and the Limanorans knew that their marvellous progress had been largely due to the early resolve to have nothing to do with the occult or merely mysterious. Their pioneering books dealt with what still lay under the horizon of the future; but they started from recognised facts and principles and attempted to supply working hypotheses for the men of science. There was nothing of magic or superstition in them, nothing that did not appeal to the laws of reason and ascertained scientific data, nothing that was not meant to be tested by the methods of daily practical life.

Not that they never thought over the problems that are commonly called religious, or yearned for communion with existences nobler than their own. But their thoughts and feelings were kept out of the sphere of definite expression, through fear that their temporary solutions might crystallise and become permanent. Their faith was purely individual and inward. Yet, when some great step was to be taken in the onward march of the race, as for instance, when a new type of child or enterprise was preparing to be born, the whole community yearned silently towards the living spirit of the cosmos; all their being thrilled with one magnetism that seemed to quiver upwards through the ether, and return again to strengthen and console them in their work. Their ideal seemed to pass as by an inspiration into the child or the enterprise about to be born. The universe, they felt, echoed to their thought; but it would have been desecration to put their seerlike longing into any form of human expression.

This was the nearest they came to what is called worship in other nations. It was difficult to get them to speak of it, for what they would have called their religion was their whole life, their pressing forward and upward in development. Their religion was what Europeans would have defined as the discovery of God, rather than the worship of any idea of Him. It was based on the knowledge that the world had advanced from insignificant life to comparatively noble self-conscious life, and it held firmly that no finality could have yet been reached, that there was nobler life beyond still to achieve. Ever, as they climbed upwards in development, they had descried new ideals on the far horizon that threw into shadow what they had been aiming at. On and on would they still climb, nearer and nearer to the ultimate ideal of the cosmos, which is God.

Not to progress was to be irreligious; even to look back and make an idol out of a superseded ideal, a hero out of a past saviour, was to sin. There had been revelations of the ultimate spirit of the cosmos, but they were ever superseded by the advance of the race; for every advance to a new type was a revelation; all true and developing life was a revelation. No revelation could be other than for a time; it was sure to lose its illuminating power as the years or the generations progressed. Many sacred books they had had, books that were no longer sacred, only retaining the reverence for that which had once aided in their development. As long as it continued to hold a beacon ahead of the race, a book remained sacred, but once its ideal had been overtaken by the national progress, light died out of it. For a dead book that retained its sacredness became a fetich and obstructed development. Not only did they reverence their sacred books; every noble utterance, every noble act, that held out an ideal for men to strive after was as sacred; but as soon as the sentiment or thought or morality was seen to be merely of the past, it was set aside. Nothing could possibly be final in a universe that was ever developing, with faculties and powers of observation that were ever getting more capable of comprehending new phases and energies of the cosmos. To accept a book or a faith or an ideal as finally sacred was to offend against the ultimate, the free spirit of the cosmos which was ever leading onwards to new heights and new outlooks into the future. There was no outer worship except life and all its works. All other worship was waste of time and effort which might have been used to raise the worshippers in the scale of being. Every attempt to conciliate God or imagine Him or model Him was blasphemy against the effort to rise towards Him. But every man had his own religious thoughts in silence, and there was welding the whole race to a common purpose, a magnetic sympathy which was deeply religious; it was the sympathy with every thought that tended to advance. But all vain contemplation or self-reflection not leading to a progressive purpose was waste of life and therefore evil. For evil, they held, is the rebellion of the past against the future; and though a new religion is an effort of nature to make alliance with the future, it soon, by reason of having reached or seeming to have reached its ideal, crystallises and becomes the ally of the past. The spirit of stagnancy and retrogression, what we in Christendom would call the devil, laughs at new religions and counts old religions as its best allies; so ran a common maxim of theirs. They would have nothing to do with what would withdraw any current of their life energy from the great work of advance.

If there was any division of their race that could be said to approach to a priesthood, it was the men and women of science, especially the pioneers, or the imaginative amongst them; for they had their eyes bent unflinchingly on the future. Theirs it was to see that the race was ever advancing. They never suffered the present to interfere with the development that was to be. They stirred their fellow-Limanorans to the enthusiasm of anticipation, and watched with unfaltering jealousy every glance turned upon the past. The moments spent upon history and antiquarian research they counted lost, unless their aim was to throw illumination upon the future. Mere students of the past were backsliders, whom they had to chide for their offences against the evolution of the cosmos. They held up to the eyes of their countrymen the nobleness and beauty of the ideals that were to be soon attained, or, if need were, the sublimity of those that lay just under the horizon in the dimness of twilight.

They would have nothing to do with mere mystery, the basis of all superstition. They never lost sight of the margin of the half-known that was ever receding before the advance of investigation into the dark infinitude, but they would have no dealings with it beyond the gaze of scientific imagination as it planted itself upon the heights of already achieved knowledge. Such dealings led to gross superstition and charlatanry, to pretence of more intercourse with the unknown than was warranted by the knowledge of the time; there was no standard by which they could be measured or checked, and, if once they were allowed, they would give unlimited scope for self-deceit and imposture. Faith was a matter for silent meditation and for dream; speech or act would only bring it down to the dull level of memory. The faith they spoke of was faith in the great future of man, and the pioneers were encouraged to sketch out and foreshadow its possibilities by way of dream; but that dream was ever the best which traced the whole faith through practice to complete achievement.

One of the great imaginative books of the time mapped out the route of self abnegation; it described the denial of the lower or material self, and the reduction of it to insignificance in the human system. It showed how by such means and by meditation a man of lofty thought might comprehend the whole range of the universe, and, passing from spiritual height to spiritual height, at last be capable of gathering infinitude within the scope of his soul. Thus could he approach to communion with the heart and soul of the cosmos, with the sun of all things. Not in one generation would this be accomplished. But, by the selection of parents who had wrought such a habit of thought and life into their constitutions, they might have in a century of generations beings who were all spirit unhampered by physical modes of thought and feeling.

Not even this ideal man of the future would they worship. For he would still be man, infinities short of the highest he could be in the cosmos; and nothing short of absolute perfection should be the object of so intense a concentration and prostration of the soul as worship. To accept any mere embodiment of humanity as the centre of adoration was antagonistic to their great ethical maxim that the ultimate object of every action or desire should be higher than the highest existing human life. To worship even the idea of humanity, were it possible for a spirit with its feelings and imagination limited to human moulds, would lower the aspirations of thought; apart from the difficulties of its abstractness, it would be open to the objection of obstructing progress by setting up a deity who was but an amalgam of all the failings, as well as all the virtues, of mankind. The Limanorans smiled at the ineptitude of making so imperfect creatures as ourselves the chief elements of godhead, when there were such infinitudes around us and above us, and such eternities before us. Even if it should be possible to eliminate from the human idea of deity all but progress and the noblest virtue, it would be obviously absurd to worship an ideal that was soon, with the earth it dwelt on, to vanish in the dust, vapour, and heat of cosmic collision. All open worship was inevitably hampered, they held, by the limitations of human nature; and anthropomorphic it must be, despite all efforts to bar out the human from it, and as anthropomorphic, certain to be antiquated by any real progress on the part of the worshippers.

These elements in religions make them the enemies of all advance except perhaps advance in luxury. Their guardians feel that they are sure to be superseded if the spirit of man should rise above the conditions in which the worships were moulded. It is one of the strongest yearnings of life to remain as it is; only there are forces material and spiritual ever goading it on the path of advance, threatening inferiority or defeat or death, unless it goes on. But so infinitesimal is the progress thus made under the sting of natural law that it is scarcely noticeable in periods short of hundreds of generations; few or no nations or races have retained historic dominance or even historic consciousness of their past so long.

This unconscious meliorism was considered by the Limanorans as little better than the development of animals, when left to themselves. Only deliberate effort on the part of a state and its members can produce advance that is to be felt, or that acts as a stimulus to farther advance. It is seldom that unconscious progress is other than material, whilst it inevitably entails reaction into stagnancy or retrogression. Nay, the whole human race at times takes a run forward, and then stumbles and falls, only to slide back into its old footprints. Some new impulse, sweeping through the ether, has stirred men in each race, whose enthusiasm, or, as it is commonly called, inspiration, awakens the spirit of progress in the era.

Conservatism is the native or fundamental attitude of every being, the tendency to make the rest of the adjacent world give way that it may perpetuate its existence or that of its brood. Selfishness is thus the very texture of life, and it is difficult to see how it can engender its opposite, self-sacrifice. The sexual and the parental instincts are the crude material of the latter. But the fire of thought and enthusiastic impulse is needed to refine this material into a love that stretches beyond the immediate object of these instincts and takes in the interests of the race and last of all those of mankind; something higher and more alien to the instincts of man is demanded for the comprehension of his nobler development. In the valley of memories was shown me at one stage of my education a complete elucidation of the prehistoric phases of evolution; first came the struggle for life amongst the innumerable claimants for the mastery of the new earth, those elementary forms that, coming out of space, will settle on any world new or old that they may encounter, the advanced organisations seeking only orbs well-fitted for their progress. Across the geological ages I could see this competition raising the minute cells of the primeval creatures into elaborately organised beings. I saw sex save the new existence from the dominion of mere brute appetite. But from outside the world came the transformation which made it the saviour of man, the ultimately dominant animal upon the sphere. This transformed instinct expanded by slow steps love of children into love of race, then into philanthropy, at first bland and crude and often unreal in the presence of the old sensual and family love, but finally strong and noble and able to embrace the progress of man as a spirit. The last stage overleapt the prehistoric, and came to be limited, except in rare and isolated instances, to Limanora. Enlightened philanthropy, I could see, held the attempt to reform all mankind as vain as to convert the lower animals into the human form and nature. Once more I went back into Fialume and studied the panorama of evolution, and I recognised the full meaning of it; the great impulses upwards and forwards had come from outside the world, and chiefest of all the longing to evolve a human nature to which death would be but an insignificant step from life to life, and which would recognise in itself more and more affinity to the highest life of infinite space.

But this section of Fialume only gave a bird’s-eye view of the elevation of life upon the earth. None were allowed to linger after they had drawn from it the lesson and the force it could give them for marching forward. Minuter study of the past might lead their youth to think ignobly of life and to accept “Might is right” as its fundamental maxim. Nature, as seen amongst the ravening beasts or amongst the naked cruelty and injustice of primitive men, might be taken by them as dominant through all human evolution. If any history was to be studied minutely, it was only the more recent history of their own race, where the old laws of nature that were opposed to justice and charity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and transcended, where new senses have opened gateways for a new knowledge which would once have been called supersensible. What could this people learn from the study of lapsed civilisations, that had risen out of childish savagery only to fall back again? The sole aim of these was happiness, and this ever degenerated into the pursuit of pleasure, ending sooner or later in brutal selfishness. It had been one of the earlier instincts from their post-purgation life, that they have least happiness who think most of it. Happiness, or even pleasure, might be made at times the test of successful actions and pursuits; but it never should be made an aim in itself. Higher civilisations were less happy than savagery or barbarism; their advances in commerce and even in science only added more consciousness of misery to the many, and more eagerness for new luxury to the few. Most civilisations, as they advance, merely add to the desires and thus more effectually enslave human nature to locality and time. The newer types produce no greater intellects, no greater imaginations, than those that have lived and fallen, whilst their masses have greatly receded in happiness and in simplicity of virtue. The changes of what is commonly called progress only bring new evils that have to be cured, and the energetic minority who have produced the changes and suppose themselves to benefit by them at first refuse to see the evils, and after a time are driven to attempt their cure by drastic remedies which bring universal ruin all the quicker.

The Limanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to allow of more than the most cursory survey of the degenerate past or of the contemporary present, even had it been to their interests to study them more minutely. Their own future was expanding in so many directions as to demand all their energies. World after world, star after star, universe after universe, were revealing their character and stage of development to Limanoran science. New marvels every year impressed upon them the wisdom of avoiding all denial and scepticism with regard to what imagination or faith should suggest, of holding neutrality towards all that was unprovable or even contrary to their knowledge of the laws of nature. They ventured only in the safe track of facts, whence they shot their flashes of conjecture into the dark. But from past experience they learned to distrust denial or even scepticism in regions where knowledge could not venture yet. Imagination had been found a trusty pioneer, and one of their recent books held out the hope that before long the suggestions of faith might be but the messages which flew through the ether over what might be called a cosmic telegraph, and that, where these touched the souls of the noblest, they came from the central spirit of the cosmos.

Already they were far on the way along several lines towards such a consummation, and modifications of their ooloran or sonarchitect had been employed in many channels of cosmic investigation. They had long ago conjectured that the earth’s atmosphere, acting as a gigantic ooloran, gathered the sound-waves that travelled through space and used them to shape the things of the earth, as they came into being; and recent discoveries had almost turned the conjecture into fact. Sometimes the vibrations came from an inchoate or a degenerate world; and then, as in the earlier or saurian stage of animal life and development, the terrene creatures took monstrous shape under the resonator of the atmosphere. Sometimes they came from orbs that knew only beauty and grace of form; and then, as when the plants and trees and flowers and shells of the earth were branching into new species, few terrestrial things but fell into graceful moulds. And now, having struck this far-reaching and fundamental thought, they turned it to noble use. They produced a huge modification of the ooloran which would fix upon the shape of a flower or fern or shell, and translate it into the music that had originally moulded it. Nothing earthly but would yield to them through this reversed sonarchitect the sonant or other vibrations that had at first shaped it. Step by step this new art which interpreted the moulding influences of the universe advanced into an organised and scientific division of the duties of the race. Step by step it mastered the harmony of form, and gave the people the music that rang through interstellar space at the shaping of the beautiful things of the world.

A great book of the time showed how far the art could go in leading their religion from the silent to the sonant form. There were vibrations throughout the cosmos that came from no one of the worlds or their inhabitants. They emanated from the centre of all existence, whence they had mysteriously moulded the spirits of great reformers and sages; they were the voice of God ringing down through the aisles of creation. It was now not only possible, but within the limits of the practicable, to find by the aid of one of their new sonarchitects the cosmic harmonies that had moulded the souls of the great enthusiasts and sages of the world. They might translate the voice of God into the vibrations that would appeal, if not to their ear, to their higher and more recent senses. The seemingly fantastic groupings of stars would send into their minds the divine secret guiding their movements. Nearer and nearer would they creep under the great dome of heaven to the centre of energy, whose voice these vibrations were. True religion though this might be, never would they consent to fix it in creed or ceremonial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchitecture go, keeping pace with their ever-advancing science, but never reaching finality in interpreting the voice of God.

Nothing in fact could be nearer to what other men call religion than Limanoran science; it was never weary of listening to the voice of God in the cosmos and ever looked upwards and onwards to a wider and loftier creation. It refused to look back, unless the retrospect was to assist its march forward. Every discovery was the truest act of devotion, a step nearer to the centre of being; and anything that would obstruct such discoveries or the advance they stimulated was retrogressive, a sin against the being who was drawing all things into the path of development. Fixity of beliefs was the surest obstruction to progress, and, along with all superstition, the grossest immorality.

There was no evil inherent in matter or any of the lower forms of life. Evil lay in returning to one of these after knowing and fulfilling something higher. It is this against which the human spirit girds when its lower elements at death go back into the grave. For, the Limanorans held, matter is not to be rigidly divided from spirit as something contrastive and antagonistic. They saw none of the strict divisions in nature that Western science and philosophy knew, arranging terrene things into matter and spirit, man and beast, and cosmic things into God and the world. Matter was vital and moving, as spirit was, though not in the same degree. Animals were ever on the same path of evolution as man was, though most species of them were far behind most of mankind. The worlds were the speech of God, methods of manifesting Himself and of making His lower manifestations evolve into higher. There were gradations throughout the cosmos, and the boundaries between them were difficult to discern.

Man is the highest grade that man knows definitely; for human personality is the amalgam of the knowing and the known. The animal as higher than the vegetable knows the world as separate from itself, but it does not know or study itself as a world apart; nor can it be conscious of the general being or purpose of the universe. Man is the first animal on earth, so far as we know, that has gained self-consciousness, and, through self-consciousness, a glimmering vision of what God might be. Only by love of retrogression or sin can this higher element in him return into the ocean of decay again. The other parts and elements of his system have to suffer reformation like exhausted worlds, in order that they may rise higher than they have been.

This was one direction their science took in finding its way towards the highest of all grades of being. But it had other lines of as truly religious investigation. For example, it had found as it proceeded more and more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, mediums which had long evaded the rude cognisance of their primitive senses but which now yielded the secret of their presence, first to their imaginations, then to their refined apparatus, and last of all to their more recently developed senses. The energies that came through them were impressed upon their senses before the mediums themselves were; and not till the senses were touched would the reason be finally persuaded of their existence. It took long ages to refine their senses or develop new senses up to the power of detecting new energies or the mediums through which these travelled. Imagination led the way; but its lead could not be trusted unless guided by scientific fact and method. Its most trustworthy henchman was invention; for this supplied apparatus that increased the perceptive powers of the senses a thousand-fold. And, as their senses grew in refinement, the instruments they invented to aid them increased in subtlety and magnifying power, so that they were ever able to keep well in advance of their own unassisted perceptive faculties.

Their sciences too had grown subtler and farther-reaching in their methods every generation. To their older chemistry, for instance, the atoms had but a speculative existence. The newer, with magnetism and electricity as its main agents and the clirolans as chief aids, dealt with them directly; and a still more marvellous analysis was developing which, adding will-force to magnetism and electricity as reagents, could find the mediums of nervous energy and classify its various kinds and modes of action. By means of this analysis they were able to get at the physical basis of reflex action, desire, appetite, and the various other semi-spiritual phenomena of humanity.

A book of the time pointed out a science as far beyond this as this had been beyond the older chemistry, for there were far subtler and higher media of energy to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the energy called soul moved. It appeared predominantly in none but the higher types of the human race, the men and women of wise creative power. Others had it as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments of great enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite and passion and at other times seemed almost to vanish. In the Limanorans it had grown to be dominant over all the faculties and powers of the human system. The book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy would be found akin to that of the central energy of the cosmos, the great being whose phases and manifestations were stars and universes. And the loftier the mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the clearer affinity it had with the creative power of infinitude. Not far below this was the medium in which the energy of morality moved; and the higher the morality the more sympathetic was its medium with that of creation. The new science foreshadowed by the book would display to the advanced race of the future the movements of these finer media, and the modes of action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative energy worked through them.

Then would they see their way to such continuance of their life as would seem to other men practical immortality. They would be able so to refine and sublimate the energies of their systems and the media through which they acted, as to be free from any of the transformations called death for almost measureless periods of time. For the subtler the medium, the more self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the less is it subject to change and the less it needs change in order to fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to creative power an energy comes, the less it needs alliance with grosser and more perishable media in order to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death become rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran science had not discovered absolute immortality; nor did it seem likely to discover it. Its experience of the cosmos pointed to change as the most widely spread of all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower media must shed them, or in other words suffer death, if it is to continue its march upwards; the whole history of the earth was a continual record of these transformations. The Limanorans had taken this aim of terrestrial existence into their own hands, and by gradually rejecting the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their system, they had been able to extend their life, at first to hundreds, and afterwards to thousands of years. They now saw before them a limitless vista along which the necessity of death or transformation would be hunted farther and farther from birth. And the same story they saw written all over the cosmos, energy as it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent for evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and nearer to what would seem immortality from the human point of view, coming closer and closer to the creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all their life was religion, and science was its true hierophant.

If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path that led the minds of men towards God, the wide-ranged sciences like astronomy, astrobiology, and astromagnetism might themselves be called the highways to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on this side of death seem to the human mind self-explanatory and self-involved; but the enfranchised life and energy that fill space have no human philosophy to account for them and have generally been denied by men. The Limanoran sciences had found space, as far as they could investigate it with their senses and their instruments, no less full of energy and life than the world itself, not merely the infinitesimal and attenuated life that they thought the débris of other worlds and systems, but the enfranchised life of highly organised beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even the new senses of the Limanorans. It was the life of such beings that the science of this people aimed at knowing intimately. On some stars, they were certain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to cognise this interstellar life without aid of instruments; and they seemed themselves to be on the verge of attaining such a power. When they gained it, they might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God. Towards this higher, enfranchised energy they laboured and struggled incessantly. They believed that its existence could be accounted for only on the assumption of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos; that there must be some great centre of completely enfranchised energy; the course of cosmic evolution pointed that way, and every so-called death or dissolution was but the enfranchisement of some higher type of energy from the lower forms with which it had been for a time allied. Even the fixed nuclei of energy, what were called matter and the atoms, were ever aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their essence. Every dissolution, every step higher in the gradation, implied an ultimate energy that was free from all the trammels of lower forms. This must be the life of pure thought that sees time past and time to be as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at a glance, that needs no sustenance from lower energies, and suffers no birth or dissolution. Towards this the whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there may be a time in the history of existence when all the fixed forms of energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last there is nothing but space and disembodied thought which is universally perceptive and creative without the aid of mediums of energy or senses. Vast systems of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only to distil the energy that was in them through living beings up into the final and immortal form that needs no process of dissolution or migration to purify it.

When they turned back from these heights to view the history of the earth, it seemed to them that creative thought was written all over it; could there be any clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence informing the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus and species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards from the microbe to the highest type of man? Their astronomical sciences pointed still more unmistakably upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The evolution of stars and systems and of life upon them seemed to them but the history of the intelligence of infinitude. They deliberately avoided all conventional idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were ever tempted through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of a living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant or animal is ever decaying, ever renewing itself, so is this cosmos, the material existence, the body of the spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever renewing itself, ever raising its energies into higher and higher forms. The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the atoms, of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one of them is moving and developing in strict relation to all the others and to the abiding spirit that is their aim and master. There is law or thought guiding the history of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; the energy of everything that seems to die has but distilled elsewhere, or transmuted into something higher and less localised. What seems to us decay is but the liberation of an energy from the less refined forms with which it has been allied. Every process moves in rhythm to the pulsations of everlasting thought that is, and realises all that was and is and is to be. Nothing falls by accident. All is transformation, growth, development towards self-subsistent thought, which moves through all the processes, conscious of itself and of them all. To this final spirit of the cosmos ten thousand ages are but as a moment. The myriads of millions of years that some stars live, and that crush our puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one heartbeat of God. The whirling universes are but molecules looked at from the view-point of the final spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic.

Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round our sun move our planets without failure of harmony, and ever round some still farther point moves our sun and his satellites, as thousands of other suns and systems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease there; great systems of universes have still more inward centres. But all this infinitude of concentricism points to some ultimate centre which is again the pivot of the cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they occasionally allowed themselves to think that this was the brain of God, the concentration of His thought-energy. But they refused to let the analogy master them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited for clearer and farther-reaching light. To define what lay so far beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they knew too well from their own past history into what labyrinths of error a single untruth will lead a race, especially if it is planted and watered by religion.

Only where science flashed its light forth into the darkness would they dare to define any feature or form of religion. God, they felt, was the infinite conservation of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever climbed towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the divine, the goal to which creation groaned and struggled. The grosser forms of energy were the caput mortuum of former mixed beings and worlds, after the sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this residue in its new period of probation were distilled again energies that swept upwards. If such lapses from the universal progress of the cosmos occur in self-conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are they breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the all, sins. Conversion is the entrance of consciousness of the universal law and of willing obedience to it into the nature. Religious and moral codes are strivings after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this law of progress half-understood, intrusions of an energy loftier than the sect or circle or star has been accustomed to. Every new faith is a miracle to its early believers; for it is a prevision of the universal law which is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises them into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes them accept it as the final revelation, and their descendants, after they have advanced to a natural view of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is divine, and strain every word and feature of it in order to find the divine in it.

A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the way of biological psychology towards the goal of religion. It showed how the plant has a dim sense of its being moulded from without, chiefly by the grosser forms of energy; and how the animal though subject to them is yet capable of moving amongst them and rebelling against their power; whilst the human is attained when this rebellion rises into capacity to rule them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the Limanoran distinction between the grossly human and the wisely human, and held that there were geological ages of development lying between these; for the one is conscious of the self as merely allied with the grosser forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other is the consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied with the law of the all. It conceived that the next grade was the divine, distinguished by consciousness of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the divine. There was it is true in all men the possibility of this, though in most it was latent. The loftiest kind of energy they had yet discovered had as its distinction the sense of continuity of existence, the power to think back through the past and forward through the future; this is perhaps what is meant by personal identity in Western philosophy, the capacity to keep the self from being merged in the mass of energies that fill space. Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy way. In savages and in those of the civilised who fall away from the universal law of progress it is obscured or buried by the dominance of the lower and transitory forms of energy. The book imagined that when the wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that it cannot amalgamate again with those they have been accustomed to upon earth; it seeks higher alliance and higher spheres than it has hitherto known; and, once having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can move amid the grosser forms and elements untainted, unsubdued, unrecognised, by them. Gravitation and heat and electricity have no power over it and come into relationship to it only when it wills to use them; for they are the mediate forms of energy that move the molecules and atoms; and they are moved and piloted by still higher forms, that are perchance the will-power or spirit of God; these higher forms come not yet within the range of human senses, but are inferred by human reason and conceived by human imagination as conscious of themselves, evident every where by their results, the marks of intelligence throughout the cosmos. But this book imagined that the disembodied energy of the wise knew and felt them, and thus came nearer to the spirit and fountain of all. Once our universe has distilled its best energies into space and has accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly worlds “paling their now ineffectual fires” encounter in their natural epicycloidal course round unperceived centres the systems that they have encountered myriads of geological ages before; and the collision of the two again sends them on their career of the evolution of their lower energies into higher.

But the Limanorans were chary of claiming anything that they discovered or conceived as the ultimate or the absolute; so many absolutes of the past had after a time yielded points of view into infinities beyond them. Hundreds of their scientific highroads led manifestly towards one centre; but they could not say that that was the final centre or God. Just as their sun with its satellites moved round another centre, which was itself in revolution, so might the common point to which their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the outer rim of a series of sciences that had a still more inward centre. Their highest faculties might have above them faculties belonging to other beings in the cosmos as superior to reason and imagination as reason and imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the animals. The savage had no power to comprehend the results of the reasoning capacities of the civilised man; and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might begin to perceive the heights of development in faculty he had still to climb. All their recent experience bade them wait further light and refuse to accept any revelation of being as ultimate, and in the rejection of all dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude for imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude of waiting for light. The book had embodied in it an apologue that put this belief concretely.

If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were able to examine and analyse its conditions and surroundings and had the faculty of reverence, its first religion would have as its object the host on which it battened, and would endow its deity with its own parasitic faculties and desires. But as its horizon widened and it found its host but the dependent of another vital centre, it would contemn the mediacy of the microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and omnipotent edition of itself. With its vision and all its powers of observation fixed upon the host of its host, it would soon come to see how its deity was not self-subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the human body with its comparative infinitude would afterwards take the place of the flea in the reverence of the microbe’s parasite, and be accepted as the vastest and most etherealised edition of itself the parasite could conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real limits and faculties of its new deity. As soon as it was able to measure and define these, it would undeify man and substitute for him that which man inhabited, and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and limitations.

Following the analogy, the new book saw an infinitude of pitfalls and disillusionments before the religious faculty of man, and refused to accept man’s similes and metaphors as in any way accurate representations of the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain marked by all the narrowness of human limitations. Scientific discovery must be the only guide of religion; and the more they advanced in their sciences, the nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it was that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion of their energy or time from scientific pursuits and investigations. To know the cosmos better was to approach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, to grow more truly religious.

The last decennial review that I witnessed, occurring as it did just before I set out over the circle of mist, impressed upon me the provisional as well as the fundamental character of their religious ideals. Most of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at that period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy as their theme; to me they struck far beyond all that the most idealistic of Western religious books had ever attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were wholly based upon the indications that recent discoveries had given. In a still more startling way, they were taken as but temporary satisfactions of futuritive yearnings; they bent the highest energies of the Limanorans into paths that led beyond what they could see from their actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past experience that the full blaze of noon would before long fall upon these dim regions now lit up only by presciential imagination. These books they now reverenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as scientific advance should wither them into the trite and commonplace, nothing could ever make them again guides into the darkness of the unknown, nothing in short could ever restore their sacredness.