absurd. Even her most devoted worshippers were a little
ashamed of her, and served her more with heart and in deed than with their
tongues. Theirs was no lip service; on the contrary, even when worshipping her
most devoutly, they would often deny her. Take her all in all, however, she was
a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much she was denied so long
as she was obeyed and feared, and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths
which make life tolerably happy, who would never have been kept there otherwise,
and over whom a higher and more spiritual ideal would have had no power.
    I greatly doubt whether the Erewhonians are yet prepared for any better
religion, and though (considering my gradually strengthened conviction that they
were the representatives of the lost tribes of Israel) I would have set about
converting them at all hazards had I seen the remotest prospect of success, I
could hardly contemplate the displacement of Ydgrun as the great central object
of their regard without admitting that it would be attended with frightful
consequences; in fact were I a mere philosopher, I should say that the gradual
raising of the popular conception of Ydgrun would be the greatest spiritual boon
which could be conferred upon them, and that nothing could effect this except
example. I generally found that those who complained most loudly that Ydgrun was
not high enough for them had hardly as yet come up to the Ydgrun standard, and I
often met with a class of men whom I called to myself high Ydgrunites (the rest
being Ydgrunites, and low Ydgrunites), who, in the matter of human conduct and
the affairs of life, appeared to me to have got about as far as it is in the
right nature of man to go.
    They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word; and what has one not said
in saying this? They seldom spoke of Ydgrun, or even alluded to her, but would
never run counter to her dictates without ample reason for doing so; in such
cases they would override her with due self-reliance, and the goddess seldom
punished them; for they are brave, and Ydgrun is not. They had most of them a
smattering of the hypothetical language, and some few more than this, but only a
few. I do not think that this language has had much hand in making them what
they are; but rather that the fact of their being generally possessed of its
rudiments was one great reason for the reverence paid to the hypothetical
language itself.
    Being inured from youth to exercises and athletics of all sorts, and living
fearlessly under