Ah! what an empire is His!  How, even at the antipodes, will these lines touch in your heart a chord responsive to that which vibrates in mine! ....  I go to Harrington in a few days, and as our conversation (perhaps, alas! our controversies) will turn upon some of the most momentous religious topics of the day, I shall keep an exact journal—­Boswellize, in fact—­for you, as well as I can; and how well some of my earlier days have practised my memory for this humble office you know.  I shall have a pleasure in this, not only because you will be glad to hear all I can communicate respecting one you love so well, but also because in this way, perhaps, I shall in part fulfil your earnest request to let you know the state of religion amongst us.  You will expect, of course, to find only that portion of our conversations reported which relates to these subjects; but I anticipate, in discussing others, some compensation for the misery which will, I fear, attend the discussion of these.

Thank your convert Outai for his present of his grim idol.  It is certainly “brass for gold,” considering what I sent him; but do not tell him so.  If a man gives us his gods, what more can he do?  And yet, it seems, he may be the richer for the loss.  Never was a question more senseless than that of the idolatrous fool,—­“Ye have taken away my gods, and what else have I left?” His godship was a little injured in his transit; but he was very perfect in deformity before, and his ugliness could not, by any accident, be improved.  I have put him into a glass case with some stuffed birds, at which he ogles, with his great eyes, in a manner not altogether divine.  His condition, therefore, is pretty nearly that to which prophecy has doomed all his tribe; if not cast to the “moles and the bats,” it is to the owls and parrots.  I cannot help looking at him sometimes with a sort of respect as contrasted with his worshippers; for though they have been fools enough to worship him, he has, at least, not been fool enough to worship them.  Yet even they are better than the Pantheist, who must regard it and every thing else, himself included, as a fragment of divinity.  I fear that, if I could regard either the Pantheist or myself as divine, nothing in the world could keep me from blasphemy every day and all day long.

“Again!” you will say, “my brother; is not that old vein of bitterness yet exhausted?” But be it known to you that that last sarcasm was especially for my own behoof.  She is a sly jade,—­conscience; like many other folks, she has a trick of expressing her rebukes in general language; as thus:  “What a contemptible set of creatures the race of men are!”—­hoping that some folks will practically take it to heart.  Sometimes I do; and sometimes, I suppose, like my fellows, I look very grave, and approvingly say, “It is but too true,” with the air of one who philosophically assents to a proposition in which he is totally uninterested; whereupon conscience becomes outrageous and—­personal.