Limanora the island of progress
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