This people have a religion, and, whatever may be said against it, atleast it has these strange peculiarities: firstly, that all believe inthe creed they profess; secondly, that they all practice the preceptswhich the creed inculcates. They unite in the worship of one divineCreator and Sustainer of the universe. They believe that it is one ofthe properties of the all-permeating agency of vril, to transmit tothe well-spring of life and intelligence every thought that a livingcreature can conceive; and though they do not contend that the idea of aDiety is innate, yet they say that the An (man) is the only creature,so far as their observation of nature extends, to whom 'the capacityof conceiving that idea,' with all the trains of thought which open outfrom it, is vouchsafed. They hold that this capacity is a privilege thatcannot have been given in vain, and hence that prayer and thanksgivingare acceptable to the divine Creator, and necessary to the completedevelopment of the human creature. They offer their devotions both inprivate and public. Not being considered one of their species, I wasnot admitted into the building or temple in which the public worship isrendered; but I am informed that the service is exceedingly short, andunattended with any pomp of ceremony. It is a doctrine with the Vril-ya,that earnest devotion or complete abstraction from the actual worldcannot, with benefit to itself, be maintained long at a stretch by thehuman mind, especially in public, and that all attempts to do so eitherlead to fanaticism or to hypocrisy. When they pray in private, it iswhen they are alone or with their young children.
They say that in ancient times there was a great number of books writtenupon speculations as to the nature of the Diety, and upon the forms ofbelief or worship supposed to be most agreeable to Him. But these werefound to lead to such heated and angry disputations as not only to shakethe peace of the community and divide families before the most united,but in the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, theexistence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what wasworse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the humandisputants. "For," said my host, "since a finite being like an An cannotpossibly define the Infinite, so, when he endeavours to realise an ideaof the Divinity, he only reduces the Divinity into an An like himself."During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, thoughnot forbidden, have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterlyinto disuse. The Vril-ya unite in a conviction of a future state, morefelicitous and more perfect than the present. If they have very vaguenotions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments, it is perhapsbecause they have no systems of rewards and punishments amongthemselves, for there are no crimes to punish, and their moral standardis so even that no An among them is, upon the whole, considered morevirtuous than another. If one excels, perhaps in one virtue, anotherequally excels in some other virtue; If one has his prevalent fault orinfirmity, so also another has his. In fact, in their extraordinarymode 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 oncebestowed, even in the vegetable world, as the reader will see in thenext chapter.