Godfrey Sweven

“ Nothing could surpass the electric effect of some of those preachers on their audiences; you could hear strong men weep, and women that were usually marvels of silence cry out in wild ecstasy; thousands would sway as one soul to the passion of the speaker, or again a ripple of laughter would freshen over the throng, to be followed by a shadow of pathos like a summer cloud over corn-fields. I have seen men and women who had entered the building with smiling faces fall prostrate on the marble floors in an agony of repentance. ”

“ What floods of eloquence were turned on to the theme! What pictures of the happy state that would ensue on each new expansion of the electorate proposed! How cruel and inhuman those who opposed it! The toughest struggle was the first for the removal of the most irrational of all the political disabilities and anomalies that had grown up with the growth of the community. If any human system remains untouched for a generation or two without any automatic power of self-adaptation, it becomes a caricature of justice and wisdom through the growth of the commonweal to which it is intended to apply. ”

“ The Tirralarians had based their whole life and civilisation on the maxim that neither the past nor the future is theirs to deal in. Time is but the flight of a moment between two midnights; all else is a dream; out of a dream we issue; into a dream we vanish; how vain to spend our only sleepless present as a lethargic past or an uncreated future!
And, as I walked about with them, I felt that there was something strikingly ephemeral in their existence. The only members of the community that thought of anything but the immediate hour were the advisers of the people ”

“ The nursery of mankind needed replenishing. It was useless introducing sires, for the Figlefians were the finest on the globe. All that was needed was new dams that the great experimental method for the conversion of the world might proceed. There was no religion like that of the improvement of the human race; and no such improvement could there be as by the Figlefian scheme of cross-breeding and defertilising the failures. Did not my heart burn within me as I listened to the mighty creed? Did not I feel that the world, if not the universe, was getting reborn? ”

“ Amongst the few items of fact that floated on the torrent of his imagination were these: the name of the island was, translated, the Land of Lofty Lineage, and there were none amongst them whose ancestry did not trace back to some god; their history covered myriads of centuries; and no race on the face of the earth or even in the heavens above could compare with them in ancientness or nobility; ah, they were the most unfortunate of men, so lonely in their majestic isolation, there being none in the universe with whom they could deal on an equal footing. ”

“ Ah, if only men knew how much the difference meant to their souls and to the destiny of the world, they would not trifle with the question! It was the deadliest poison, the rankest sin to wear black and yellow. All moral evils went with this mixture. And if I knew how serious a thing life was, I would join them in their crusade against this diabolism in colour, would put forth every effort to suppress it and prevent the world being lost.
I would have burst into a roar of laughter, but that I caught a warning glance in Sneekape’s eye. ”

“ It was indeed an Olympus that was so united, so free from all jealousy and enmity that it formed but one god, just as the living cells of the human body, though each having its own individuality, made but one human life. And there was still infinity to fill. Worlds died every hour, having fulfilled their purpose of producing all the divine life whereof they were capable. Every hour worlds were born evolving energy and at last life, which rose by stages up to the human that dying might be divine. The stellar system is but a great god-factory. Not an atom that lives is wasted. ”

“ He had seen me in Aleofane when he was there on a mission to the heathen; and he had yearned to save my soul from the baneful influence of men who had not the true faith—faith in altruism. He asked me if I knew that I had landed in one of the noblest countries in the universe, Meddla, the Isle of Philanthropy. Here was the true centre of the universal fire of love. Here lived those who yearned to save the souls of their neighbours, who cared not what became of themselves, if only other men were saved. ”

“ We are all priests as we are all kings in our community. To have a hierarchy or even an intermediary who should be supposed to be in more direct sympathy and communication with the gods than the rest is the worst of insults to the divine energy of the soul. To make a special profession of that which is the aim of embodied life is but to commercialise the divine and embrute the human. The priests place their feet on the necks of the ignorant, and it is their interest to reduce all to ignorance. ”

“ The meaner side of human nature was gratified to see these pompous pretenders and bullies biting the dust before one of their own kin and revealing so plainly how natural to them was the other side of their nature, cowardice and fawning. He was their supreme god for a day or two.
Yet he knew that the charm would not work long, and that, when they discovered how like he was to themselves as an artist in genealogical fiction, they would turn and rend him. He chose the very top of the wave of devotion, and we made a triumphal exit, our canoe full of all manner of dainties and luxurious foods. ”

“ The criminals of the archipelago had ceased to believe in Palindician justice, and preferred in their blindness to take refuge in some other paradise; and it looked as if the inhabitants of this unfortunate island would either have to find subjects for their judicial talent in their own ranks or abandon its refinement and power through want of practice. Such a dilemma never had any people had to face.
And where would justice find a home, if they were driven to the latter alternative? Would not the world mourn the greatest of virtues perished, if once she were banished from her last refuge? ”

“ Instead of the equality, which is the true principle of life, we should have a double tyranny; we should grovel before our gods, whose superstitions would weigh us to the ground; and we should have their professional agents introducing the caprice and imperfection of the human into their yoke. I know not which is the worse: the purely spiritual slavery of timid, startled worship, or the mingled slavery of priestcraft that makes the divine mysterious and terrible in order that the worshippers may bow before it body and soul. ”

“ Ah, the fervour, the devotion, the self-sacrifice, the millions lavished upon these aliens! One must have been valued as much by the gods as a thousand Aleofanians brought up to the Aleofane worship. For tens of thousands huddled together in the fold, heedless of their own spiritual welfare, ignoring the existence of the temples, starving, unkempt, and ragged. Never were the grimy mob permitted to soil the precincts of the holy places, or to mar the beauty of the art displayed in them by the inhabitants of the marble city. ”

“ He evidently knew the side of the island that was least open to attack and therefore least watched. In the dim underlight of the dark moonless night we could discern cliffs rise and snowless levels stretch dim and mysterious. Still no sign of the storm-cone, though we could see the line of its passage black round the snowy shoulders of the giant peak. On we forged as swiftly as steam could make the Daydream fly. Noola paced anxiously from bow to stern, from the look-out man to the wheel, never relaxing his gaze into the darkness. It was a race with the quickest thoughts upon the earth. ”

“ But I had the suspicion that these were but the floating remains of a great intellectual past come down the stream of heredity, for I saw gleam out of the eyes of most that I did not speak to the spirit of a wolf or of a sloth. Envy, malice, hatred, the passionate soul of Cain, had not vanished with the destruction of property, class, profession, literature, art. Low living without any thinking was the rule of the majority perforce; and it was these embruted elements of the nation that usually survived a famine or plague. ”

“ I have come to the conclusion that all government is but giving the monopoly of opportunity to one set of robbers in order to save the nation from the ravages of most others. It is worse for the higher natures of the governing than for those of the governed; and I have recanted my heresies.
“How weary I grew of the pomp and show of the court, of the dreary round of war and dissipation! I would have given the world for exile into solitude; and yet I dared not secede from the monarch and his following. I had shown myself too resourceful to be allowed to go free in the island. ”

“ The people, though they continue to sing his songs, will utterly forget him; and this the priests knew well, when they ceased their resistance yesterday.”
I looked down to the ghouls that battened below us on the hideous past; I looked up to the great edifice that dominated the island; and I remembered the vaunting inscriptions that decorated its interior. “Here dwell the immortals”; “Who enter here never die”; “The gaze of all men is upon us”; “The centre of the universe.” The valley of death and oblivion was the natural complement of this hill of arrogance and self-righteousness. ”

“ The more sincere of his followers were satisfied with the change, and settled down to their old life of discontent or content. The world took shelter under the beliefs of this hater of the world. His creed was emasculated of its socialism and altruism in deed, but was accepted in word. It became the symbol of all that was gorgeous and tyrannical. Magnificent temples rose for its worship; and in them haughty priests officiated. He who had been the apostle and prophet of the poor became the god of the rich and powerful. The new religion had left the nation not much better than it had been. ”

“ It is the natural development of a community in which one half are creators and the other half critics by profession. The latter absorb the reality of power and luxury and fame; the former get the shadow. The critics pretend to worship creation; they are the gods, for they have the omniscience; they give the rules and the ideals that are thought divine; to their fiat the others have to bow. They have enslaved the intelligence of the island and are gradually stifling it, that there may be as little chance of outbreak as might come from beasts. ”

“ Every house bore evidence of having stood siege: it was cracked and splashed with mud in almost every part; there were some spaces that were left intact, and on these I saw something engraved; it was, Blastemo interpreted, the chief maxim of their adored book: ‘God has given us to know all things, and to say all things without error; let the world worship us, His prophets and vicegerents upon earth.’ Where this was written, the glass was thin and transparent, so that it could be read both without and within; all the rest was fortified to stand a siege by any one group. ”

“ I saw that some such spiritual control over men was needed, if universal peace were to be attained on the earth. I still believed that peace was the true aim of human civilisation, and that this could be reached only by such warlike forces and such spiritual authority in the hands of a single governor or council of governors as would make rebellion seem an impossibility and a farce to every reasoning mind.
“I have been utterly disabused of all such thoughts. Such peace can mean nothing but universal stagnancy of mankind. There is no advance, no life without struggle and competition. ”

“ Death deifies all men; evil falls away from them with their bodies; and, winged through the vault, the souls flit, rid of passion and whatsoever clogs pure thought. They have no desire to materialise again; they have no desires at all. They can interpenetrate and unite and disunite without the sense of disunion. They are one with existence that is not bound to what is matter or has senses. They make the final all; and yet this all increases every moment with transcendent growth. Its one imperfection is that it cannot fill the whole of space; its one aspiration is to colonise infinity. ”

“ Not far from it is the isle of Cryptia, where the dwellers spend most of their time in mystic ceremonies and parades, dressed in the most fantastic garments, and carrying the most ludicrous paraphernalia of office; their ceremonies are performed in dark caves dimly lit, and, in order to impress the imagination, mimic in absurd fashion the wild feasts and rites of savages; they believe in a religion without a god, without the religious or moral spirit; a religion that is nothing but ceremonial. ”

“ There was something of true genius in convicting an innocent man, and in making his friends feel that there was something wrong about him. His defence was so earnest that his prosecution and trial had to be exhibitions of the greatest judicial talent in order to secure his condemnation. A real criminal was clogged and handicapped by the consciousness of his crime, and after a little struggle succumbed. The guiltless or his friends kept up the judicial battle for years, and the whole nation was drawn into the case, so that every citizen revelled in the exercise of his sense of justice. ”

“ Past New Zealand with her sombre fiords and the argent glory of her mountains we swept, gleaning from her sealers and whalers still more of the mysteries of the dim Pacific world we were about to see. Our blood coursed quicker in our veins as we touched the first palm-fringed atolls of the coral belt. And every new island we reached we seemed to get closer and closer to the centre of the primitive world we desired to visit. ”