Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His SonButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son
Butler, Samuel
Satire; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
11. God’s conscious life, nascent, so far as this world is concerned,
in the infusoria, adolescent in the higher mammals, approaches
maturity on this earth in man. All these living beings are members
one of another, and of God.
12. Therefore, as man cannot live without God in the world, so
neither can God live in this world without mankind.
13. If we speak ill of God in our ignorance it may be forgiven us;
but if we speak ill of His Holy Spirit indwelling in good men and
women it may not be forgiven us.
The Head Manager now resumed his place by President Gurgoyle’s side, and
the President in the name of his Majesty the King declared the temple to
be hereby dedicated to the contemplation of the Sunchild and the better
exposition of his teaching. This was all that was said. The reliquary
was then brought forward and placed at the top of the steps leading from
the apse to the nave; but the original intention of carrying it round the
temple was abandoned for fear of accidents through the pressure round it
of the enormous multitudes who were assembled. More singing followed of
a simple but impressive kind; during this I am afraid I must own that my
father, tired with his walk, dropped off into a refreshing slumber, from
which he did not wake till George nudged him and told him not to snore,
just as the Vice-Manager was going towards the lectern to read another
chapter of the Sunchild’s Sayings--which was as follows:-
The Sunchild also spoke to us a parable about the unwisdom of the
children yet unborn, who though they know so much, yet do not know as
much as they think they do.
He said:-
“The unborn have knowledge of one another so long as they are unborn,
and this without impediment from walls or material obstacles. The
unborn children in any city form a population apart, who talk with one
another and tell each other about their developmental progress.
“They have no knowledge, and cannot even conceive the existence of
anything that is not such as they are themselves. Those who have been
born are to them what the dead are to us. They can see no life in
them, and know no more about them than they do of any stage in their
own past development other than the one through which they are passing
at the moment. They do not even know that their mothers are
alive--much less that their mothers were once as they now are. To an
embryo, its mother is simply the environment, and is looked upon much
as our inorganic surroundings are by ourselves.
“The great terror of their lives is the fear of birth,--that they
shall have to leave the only thing that they can think of as life, and
enter upon a dark unknown which is to them tantamount to annihilation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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