CHAPTER VALEOFANIAN SOCIETY AND RELIGION
LIKE their language, their social fabric was an intricate work of art, and it took me months to understand even its elementary lessons and principles. It had the qualities of all great products of nature or human industry; its structure at the first glance was simple and clear; but it would have taken the lifetime of Methuselah to study out its meanings and principles. Those who belonged to the inner circles, of course, knew the whole code of conduct; but they kept a judicious silence on disputed points, and nearly all points were disputed. It was perfectly simple, they said; in fact, they would not condescend to explain the obvious. I was perpetually meeting difficulties, but they smiled a superior smile and let me flounder. Even my old tutor threw mystery round the topic and indulged in smiling silence over my bewilderment. I have little doubt that what seemed paradox and contradiction to me was to them clear and harmonious.
The first principle of their life was, I was assured on all sides, devotion to truth. The name of their country, Aleofane, meant, they insisted, the gem of truth. Every statement they made was prefaced with an appeal to truth in the abstract, and ended, if it were of any length, with an apostrophe to the deity as the god of truth. Their favourite oaths had reference to the virtue of truthfulness. Their greatest heroes never told a lie, as the tombstones and biographies showed in letters of gold. Their commonest form of asseveration was, “May all the spirits of dead truth-speakers testify,” or “In the name of all who have been great and truthful.” And in every one of their courts of law and witnessing-places there was a copy of their sacred books; and this had grown greasy with the kisses of myriads of these Aleofanians, swearing upon it to the truth of what they said. Nay, the expletive that entered into every second phrase of conversation—“dyoos”—was the popular remains of a prayer that perdition might catch their souls if they did not speak the truth.
I had found an ideal people. This was my reflection as I discovered how deep was their reverence for truth—so candid were they, and yet so courteous. With my own crude knowledge of their language and conventions, I was ever stumbling into some too candid statement that my tutor advised me to withdraw. That was but a small check to my great joy in finding a people so sincere, so removed from all falsity. Wherever I went I found statues of Truth or of the heroes of truthfulness; there were temples and shrines specially devoted to Her worship; and the sacred books of the people were the embodiment of absolute truth concerning the universe. Some, if not most, of the historical statements in these and all of their representations of the laws and processes of nature had been challenged by latter-day investigators as contrary to fact. But the priests and theologians had amply shown how these writers had, with their eyes blinded and uninspired, taken the crude superficial sense and failed to penetrate beneath the veil under which the truth sheltered itself from the profane gaze. Daily they prelected on the hidden meaning of their inspired literature; but the people were so convinced of the greatness of truth and the safeness of the hands to which absolute truth had been intrusted, that few or none ever listened to these prelections, for if any went to hear them, they fell promptly asleep in order to show how unquestioning was their faith. It was one of the most convincing testimonies, I was assured, to the inspiration of their sacred books and the supremacy of Aleofanian worship—this child-like trust of the people; nay, I have heard priests declare that, as they read or spoke their defences of the absolute truth of their religion, the nasal confession of implicit faith that rang through the temple seemed to them like the trumpets of heaven proclaiming theirs the only true creed on earth. Ah! the devotion of these men to truth! Nothing could stand in its way. Their predecessors in former ages had tortured with the greatest ingenuity, disembowelled, roasted alive the deniers or questioners of the truth of their tenets, so much did they love that truth. And these guardians of it would have done the same but for the sweetness and nobleness of their courtesy and forbearance. They went so far as to hold that even the precepts, if not the spirit, of their absolute truth must be disregarded at times, when dealing with those who would throw doubt upon it. What was there to compensate for its loss in life, if once it were allowed to be questioned? “Truth first and all the world after” was a favourite saying. And they considered that they might violate all the temporal and local laws and forms of truth in order to preserve intact and undoubted truth absolute, seeing that they had it amongst them in written form. It was all for the good of the race and the creed,i.e., the ultimate good of the whole universe. Little wonder that the Aleofanians, whether dead or alive, could sleep at peace within the temple walls! “The truth must be believed in by all even at the cost of truth”; this was the motto of these noble guardians of the faith.