The Coming Race eBook

Should life be spared to me, I may collect into systematic form such knowledge as I acquired of this language during my sojourn amongst the Vril-ya.  But what I have already said will perhaps suffice to show to genuine philological students that a language which, preserving so many of the roots in the aboriginal form, and clearing from the immediate, but transitory, polysynthetical stage so many rude incumbrances, s from popular ignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which precedes its decease, as (to cite illustrations from the upper world) during the French Reign of Terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republic preceding the ascendancy of Augustus, their name for that state of things is Glek-Nas.  Ek is strife—­Glek, the universal strife.  Nas, as I before said, is corruption or rot; thus, Glek-Nas may be construed, “the universal strife-rot.”  Their compounds are very expressive; thuat which the Ana have attained forbids the progressive cultivation of literature, especially in the two main divisions of fiction and history,—­I shall have occasion to show later.

Chapter XIII.

This people have a religion, and, whatever may be said against it, at least it has these strange peculiarities:  firstly, that all believe in the creed they profess; secondly, that they all practice the precepts which the creed inculcates.  They unite in the worship of one divine Creator and Sustainer of the universe.  They believe that it is one of the properties of the all-permeating agency of vril, to transmit to the well-spring of life and intelligence every thought that a living creature can conceive; and though they do not contend that the idea of a Diety is innate, yet they say that the An (man) is the only creature, so far as their observation of nature extends, to whom ’the capacity of conceiving that idea,’ with all the trains of thought which open out from it, is vouchsafed.  They hold that this capacity is a privilege that cannot have been given in vain, and hence that prayer and thanksgiving are acceptable to the divine Creator, and necessary to the complete development of the human creature.  They offer their devotions both in private and public.  Not being considered one of their species, I was not admitted into the building or temple in which the public worship is rendered; but I am informed that the service is exceedingly short, and unattended with any pomp of ceremony.  It is a doctrine with the Vril-ya, that earnest devotion or complete abstraction from the actual world cannot, with benefit to itself, be maintained long at a stretch by the human mind, especially in public, and that all attempts to do so either lead to fanaticism or to hypocrisy.  When they pray in private, it is when they are alone or with their young children.