They never permitted themselves to lay too much stress on any sacred book, or to adore it too passionately, however much they might be guided by it for a time; for they knew from experience that it would soon be worked into the nature of the race and the system of the individual, and another would take its place. The sacred book of to-day was bound to be transcended to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of this year would be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book, its precepts unworked into the life, its pictures and ideals unrealised; to adore its words and deny its spirit by failing to advance beyond its point of view. A book too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and barbarism against a race and an insult to its intelligence. It proves that the civilisation has become stereotyped, or worse, retrospective; to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate before a dead ideal, to propagate and die, sum up the ultimate duties of existence at its highest level. Every book was sacred to the Limanorans which threw light upon the track ahead into the darkness; and so long as it still gave light where light was needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light became the common daylight around the race, and especially if they had to look backwards in order to see its waymarks, then was it promptly committed to the valley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its precepts after they had become the laws of everyday existence. They had known from their own history what a terrible engine of oppression a book might be when once it had become antiquated without losing the adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had become mere tales of the past, had to be projected again into the future by mystic interpretation; its precepts, embodying the spirit of a generation long dead, had to be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text to prevent the human mind moving on past its own stage of morality and civilisation. How many ages in their own history did their ancestors live with their dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had the grave-clothes of the past intertwined; and what torture to love and the noblest feelings, what bloodshed and horrors it cost them to be able to stand off from their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced mind! It had become a part of their best selves, and it seemed like suicide to cast it from them, and relegate it to its true home, the graveyard of the past.