y of torture; but the words stuck in my throat as soon as I
began.

Whether a professional missionary might have a better chance I know not;
such persons must doubtless know more about the science of conversion:
for myself, I could only be thankful that I was in the right path, and
was obliged to let others take their chance as yet. If the plan fails by
which I propose to convert them myself, I would gladly contribute my mite
towards the sending two or three trained missionaries, who have been
known as successful converters of Jews and Mahometans; but such have
seldom much to glory in the flesh, and when I think of the high
Ydgrunites, and of the figure which a missionary would probably cut among
them, I cannot feel sanguine that much good would be arrived at. Still
the attempt is worth making, and the worst danger to the missionaries
themselves would be that of being sent to the hospital where Chowbok
would have been sent had he come with me into Erewhon.

Taking then their religious opinions as a whole, I must own that the
Erewhonians are superstitious, on account of the views which they hold of
their professed gods, and their entirely anomalous and inexplicable
worship of Ydgrun, a worship at once the most powerful, yet most devoid
of formalism, that I ever met with; but in practice things worked better
than might have been expected, and the conflicting claims of Ydgrun and
the gods were arranged by unwritten compromises (for the most part in
Ydgrun's favour), which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred were very
well understood.

I could not conceive why they should not openly acknowledge high
Ydgrunism, and discard the objective personality of hope, justice, &c.;
but whenever I so much as hinted at this, I found that I was on dangerous
ground. They would never have it; returning constantly to the assertion
that ages ago the divinities were frequently seen, and that the moment
their personality was disbelieved in, men would leave off practising even
those ordinary virtues which the common experience of mankind has agreed
on as being the greatest secret of happiness. "Who ever heard," they
asked, indignantly, "of such things as kindly training, a good example,
and an enlightened regard to one's own welfare, being able to keep men
straight?" In my hurry, forgetting things which I ought to have
remembered, I answered that if a person could not be kept straight by
these things, there was nothing that could straig