had their books, in which their
ancestors had seen the gods; on which I saw that further argument was not at all
likely to convince her; and fearing that she might tell her mother what I had
been saying, and that I might lose the hold upon her affections which I was
beginning to feel pretty sure that I was obtaining, I began to let her have her
own way, and to convince me; neither till after we were safely married did I
show the cloven hoof again.
    Nevertheless, her remarks have haunted me, and I have since met with many
very godly people who have had a great knowledge of divinity, but no sense of
the divine; and again, I have seen a radiance upon the face of those who were
worshipping the divine either in art or nature - in picture or statue - in field
or cloud or sea - in man, woman, or child - which I have never seen kindled by
any talking about the nature and attributes of God. Mention but the word
divinity, and our sense of the divine is clouded.
 

                               Chapter Seventeen

                           Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites

In spite of all the to-do they make about their idols, and the temples they
build, and the priests and priestesses whom they support, I could never think
that their professed religion was more than skin-deep; but they had another
which they carried with them into all their actions; and although no one from
the outside of things would suspect it to have any existence at all, it was in
reality their great guide, the mariner's compass of their lives; so that there
were very few things which they ever either did, or refrained from doing,
without reference to its precepts.
    Now I suspected that their professed faith had no great hold upon them -
firstly, because I often heard the priests complain of the prevailing
indifference, and they would hardly have done so without reason; secondly,
because of the show which was made, for there was none of this about the worship
of the goddess Ydgrun, in whom they really did believe; thirdly, because though
the priests were constantly abusing Ydgrun as being the great enemy of the gods,
it was well known that she had no more devoted worshippers in the whole country
than these very persons, who were often priests of Ydgrun rather than of their
own deities. Neither am I by any means sure that these were not the best of the
priests.
    Ydgrun certainly occupied a very anomalous position; she was held to be both
omnipresent and omnipotent, but she was not an elevated conception, and was
sometimes both cruel and