Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas, as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil could come of such an attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence; it was the copestone of their education; after all the field of knowledge had been traversed by them and all the reverences had been instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and not till then were they capable of realising its fulness. Communicated in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave to crude superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our youthful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any connected with reverence seem to come from the divine eternity beyond birth. CHAPTER V JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES ONE of the things this people feared most was enslavement to the past; and I was encouraged to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with the life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious devotion to the historic. Bury the dead past, was one of their primary maxims. Nor would they permit religion or any other conservative element to hallow tradition. The world is well quit of what it has been, was another of their sayings. They seemed to look upon the past as a fierce pursuer ever ready to overtake and strangle them. Out and away from it were they ever hurrying. It was the dark shadow over existence. And into the future, into the future and the sunshine, they cut their way through the thick tangle of life.