He saw it all now.  It was twenty years next Sunday since he and my mother had eloped.  That was the meaning of XIX. xii. 29.  They had made a new era, dating from the day of his return to the palace of the sun with a bride who was doubtless to unite the Erewhonian nature with that of the sun.  The New Year, then, would date from Sunday, December 7, which would therefore become XX. i. 1.  The Thursday, now nearly if not quite over, being only two days distant from the end of a month of thirty-one days, which was also the last of the year, would be XIX. xii. 29, as on the Professors’ permit.

I should like to explain here what will appear more clearly on a later page—­I mean, that the Erewhonians, according to their new system, do not believe the sun to be a god except as regards this world and his other planets.  My father had told them a little about astronomy, and had assured them that all the fixed stars were suns like our own, with planets revolving round them, which were probably tenanted by intelligent living beings, however unlike they might be to ourselves.  From this they evolved the theory that the sun was the ruler of this planetary system, and that he must be personified, as they had personified the air-god, the gods of time and space, hope, justice, and the other deities mentioned in my father’s book.  They retain their old belief in the actual existence of these gods, but they now make them all subordinate to the sun.  The nearest approach they make to our own conception of God is to say that He is the ruler over all the suns throughout the universe—­the suns being to Him much as our planets and their denizens are to our own sun.  They deny that He takes more interest in one sun and its system than in another.  All the suns with their attendant planets are supposed to be equally His children, and He deputes to each sun the supervision and protection of its own system.  Hence they say that though we may pray to the air-god, &c., and even to the sun, we must not pray to God.  We may be thankful to Him for watching over the suns, but we must not go further.

Going back to my father’s reflections, he perceived that the Erewhonians had not only adopted our calendar, as he had repeatedly explained it to the Nosnibors, but had taken our week as well, and were making Sunday a high day, just as we do.  Next Sunday, in commemoration of the twentieth year after his ascent, they were about to dedicate a temple to him; in this there was to be a picture showing himself and his earthly bride on their heavenward journey, in a chariot drawn by four black and white horses—­which, however, Professor Hanky had positively affirmed to have been only storks.

Here I interrupted my father.  “But were there,” I said, “any storks?”