What I have said of these orders is applicable in a great degree to all the others.

In our world all particulars of conduct and goodness, as well as deviations from them, are known; nothing on these heads is, or indeed can be concealed.  I am now speaking of an advanced period of my reign; for at first, and in what I may call the intermediate or transition period, it was otherwise.  Then there were many laws and precepts established which are now all but obsolete,—­for since, the occasion for appealing to them scarcely arises.  As an example, the love and practice of truth are amongst the very first things inculcated in the child, and are now everywhere and by all classes practised in Montalluyah.  Laws, then, which suppose the possibility of a deviation from truth are scarcely ever appealed to—­such as, for instance, the precept, “Ask not your neighbour what you know he wishes to conceal, lest he lie,” and the accompanying law preventing one person from annoying another with improper questions, and thus probably drawing forth untruths.  These, like the laws and precepts enjoining all to industry, and many others, belong to a bygone age, and to another state of things, and were only needed in the intermediate epoch, just as particular remedies were then required to cure the diseases of those who, having been born before my reign, had in their childhood and youth been weakened by disease, or had received into their systems the germs of future intense suffering, which, had the child been born later, would have been completely eradicated in their incipiency.  But as these maladies existed in the intermediate epoch in their virulence, we were for a time obliged to continue the principle formerly adopted,—­that of expelling one poison by administering another.

The fact that everything belonging to women is now known and adequately recognised and rewarded makes them contented and happy.  Under the system existing before my reign this was not so,—­the most beautiful were often the most discontented; they were more easily acted upon by evil spirits, who assumed the fairest and most seductive appearances to lure their victims; they were often the most susceptible to flattery, and easiest led astray; and when once drawn from the proper path, they were the most cruelly persecuted by a class of inferior persons, who, had their own secret conduct been known to man as it is to a superior order of beings, would never have dared to throw even the smallest stone at their poor persecuted sister, who had, as was often the case, been led astray by the very excess of a virtue which defective education had left unbalanced by its regulating qualities.

Although it was one of the best known precepts of our religion that the fold should always be open to receive the strayed sheep, these piety-professors, with this precept on their lips, took care that the strayed ones should be cruelly worried and scared from the fold.