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 straighten him, and that if he
were not ruled by the love and fear of men whom he had seen, neither
would he be so by that of the gods whom he had not seen.
At one time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect who believed,
after a fashion, in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection from
the dead; they taught that those who had been born with feeble and
diseased bodies and had passed their lives in ailing, would be tortured
eternally hereafter; but that those who had been born strong and healthy
and handsome would be rewarded for ever and ever.
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