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.
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