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.
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