han human. If any one denies the objective
existence of these divinities, and says that there is really no such
being as a beautiful woman called Justice, with her eyes blinded and a
pair of scales, positively living and moving in a remote and ethereal
region, but that justice is only the personified expression of certain
modes of human thought and action--they say that he denies the existence
of justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton disturber
of men's religious convictions. They detest nothing so much as any
attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of the deities whom
they profess to worship. Arowhena and I had a pitched battle on this
point, and should have had many more but for my prudence in allowing her
to get the better of me.

I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position for
she returned more than once to the subject. "Can you not see," I had
exclaimed, "that the fact of justice being admirable will not be affected
by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent? Can you
really think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no
longer believe that hope is an actual person?" She shook her head, and
said that with men's belief in the personality all incentive to the
reverence of the thing itself, as justice or hope, would cease; men from
that hour would never be either just or hopeful again.

I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish to do so. She
deferred to me in most things, but she never shrank from maintaining her
opinions if they were put in question; nor does she to this day abate one
jot of her belief in the religion of her childhood, though in compliance
with my repeated entreaties she has allowed herself to be baptized into
the English Church. She has, however, made a gloss upon her original
faith to the effect that her baby and I are the only human beings exempt
from the vengeance of the deities for not believing in their personality.
She is quite clear that we are exempted. She should never have so strong
a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come about she does not know,
neither does she wish to know; there are things which it is better not to
know and this is one of them; but when I tell her that I believe in her
deities as much as she does--and that it is a difference about words, not
things, she becomes silent with a slight emphasis.

I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked