Limanora the island of progress
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