But first he would consult his friends; if possible obtain their sanction, and act in unison with others. He met with no encouragement. One gravely rebuked him for his presumption and conceit, and produced a long list of eminent Kaffirs who had bowed before the anchor. Another found in the absurdity of the anchor faith its best evidence of solidity. It was, he said, a faith too improbable for a Kaffir to have invented; any fool, he added, could believe a probable religion, but it needed a superior Kaffir to swallow this. Some put their tongues in their cheeks (a vulgar habit amongst the Koussa Kaffirs), and said: “Silly fellow, we know all that as well as you do, but the anchor is a profitable anchor, and as needs must, you shall be one amongst the priests.” Again, others said: “We, too, have our doubts, but as a political engine we must retain our anchor. How should we keep down the lower orders? How restrain our servants from pilfering without its influence and sanctifying power? The fact is, that in our complicated social system all society depends upon the anchor.” “Between ourselves,” one added, “if heaven had not sent that particular anchor some of us think we must have sent to Woolwich for another.” But the only arguments that caused him any hesitation, and which did give him some pain, were from certain women who implored him not to destroy their anchor idol. “We cannot judge,” said one of these, “between your arguments and the conclusions we have been brought up to reverence. The anchor may not be a god but only a symbol, but how beautiful a one! Does not the anchor save the ship? And are not our own lives, too, like the storm-tossed vessel? That anchor is associated with all we have felt, suffered, prayed for. Destroy that symbol, and you wound and endanger the deepest element of religion in our hearts.” Finally, one very intelligent friend said to him with much solemnity: “Rash man, forbear! Stop while there is time in a course that may bring down ruin on the State and on yourself, and for the doing of which you can have, as a rational being, no temptation whatever. I grant you you may be right, and the rest all wrong; but what then? We can know nothing of the matter, and _you may be wrong_. Now, anyhow, _we are on the safe side of the hedge_. If the anchor be a devil he may do you harm, and if he be only a bit of rusty iron, you will be none the worse for a bow and a grimace.”