They say that in ancient times there was a great number of books written upon speculations as to the nature of the Diety, and upon the forms of belief or worship supposed to be most agreeable to Him.  But these were found to lead to such heated and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the community and divide families before the most united, but in the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, the existence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what was worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the human disputants.  “For,” said my host, “since a finite being like an An cannot possibly define the Infinite, so, when he endeavours to realise an idea of the Divinity, he only reduces the Divinity into an An like himself.”  During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden, have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse.  The Vril-ya unite in a conviction of a future state, more felicitous and more perfect than the present.  If they have very vague notions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments, it is perhaps because they have no systems of rewards and punishments among themselves, for there are no crimes to punish, and their moral standard is so even that no An among them is, upon the whole, considered more virtuous than another.  If one excels, perhaps in one virtue, another equally excels in some other virtue; If one has his prevalent fault or infirmity, so also another has his.  In fact, in their extraordinary mode of life.  There are so few temptations to wrong, that they are good (according to their notions of goodness) merely because they live.  They have some fanciful notions upon the continuance of life, when once bestowed, even in the vegetable world, as the reader will see in the next chapter.

Chapter XIV.

Though, as I have said, the Vril-ya discourage all speculations on the nature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a belief by which they think to solve that great problem of the existence of evil which has so perplexed the philosophy of the upper world.  They hold that wherever He has once given life, with the perceptions of that life, however faint it be, as in a plant, the life is never destroyed; it passes into new and improved forms, though not in this planet (differing therein from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis), and that the living thing retains the sense of identity, so that it connects its past life with its future, and is ‘conscious’ of its progressive improvement in the scale of joy.  For they say that, without this assumption, they cannot, according to the lights of human reason vouchsafed to them, discover the perfect justice which must be a constituent quality of the All-Wise and the All-Good.  Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three causes:  want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each of these