Chapter XIII.
This people have a religion, and, whatever may be said against
it, at least it has these strange peculiarities: firstly, that
all believe in the creed they profess; secondly, that they all
practice the precepts which the creed inculcates. They unite
in the worship of one divine Creator and Sustainer of the
universe. They believe that it is one of the properties of the
all-permeating agency of vril, to transmit to the well-spring
of life and intelligence every thought that a living creature
can conceive; and though they do not contend that the idea of a
Diety is innate, yet they say that the An (man) is the only
creature, so far as their observation of nature extends, to
whom 'the capacity of conceiving that idea,' with all the
trains of thought which open out from it, is vouchsafed. They
hold that this capacity is a privilege that cannot have been
given in vain, and hence that prayer and thanksgiving are
55acceptable to the divine Creator, and necessary to the complete
development of the human creature. They offer their devotions
both in private and public. Not being considered one of their
species, I was not admitted into the building or temple in
which the public worship is rendered; but I am informed that
the service is exceedingly short, and unattended with any pomp
of ceremony. It is a doctrine with the Vril-ya, that earnest
devotion or complete abstraction from the actual world cannot,
with benefit to itself, be maintained long at a stretch by the
human mind, especially in public, and that all attempts to do
so either lead to fanaticism or to hypocrisy. When they pray
in private, it is when they are alone or with their young
children.
They say that in ancient times there was a great number of
books written upon speculations as to the nature of the Diety,
and upon the forms of belief or worship supposed to be most
agreeable to Him. But these were found to lead to such heated
and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the
community and divide families before the most united, but in
the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, the
existence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what was
worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the
human disputants. "For," said my host, "since a finite being
like an An cannot possibly define the Infinite, so, when he
endeavours to realise an idea of the Divinity, he only reduces
the Divinity into an An like himself." During the later ages,
therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden,
have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse.
The Vril-ya unite in a conviction of a future state, more
felicitous and more perfect than the present. If they have
very vague notions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments,
it is perhaps because they have no systems of rewards and
punishments among themselves, for there are no crimes to
punish, and their moral standard is so even that no An among
56them is, upon the whole, considered more virtuous than another.
If one excels, perhaps in one virtue, another equally excels in
some other virtue; If one has his prevalent fault or infirmity,
so also another has his. In fact, in their extraordinary mode
of life. there are so few temptations to wrong, that they are
good (according to their notions of goodness) merely because
they live. They have some fanciful notions upon the
continuance of life, when once bestowed, even in the vegetable
world, as the reader will see in the next chapter.
