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 acceptable 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 them 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.