CHAPTER IV.
EXPLANATIONS.
Next morning we breakfasted in strange company. We tasted a morsel of the singular perfumed food which they had supplied, and which Aleriel said he was sure would be harmless. It was most agreeable to the palate. Our meal was made, however, of the simple provisions he had got and a little coffee. No animal food was offered, and I imagine he felt scruples in procuring it. At the beginning and end of the meal our hosts, with strange but solemn and impressive gestures, sang with exquisite sweetness a short hymn. After breakfast, Aleriel said:
"Arauniel is very anxious to ask you some questions about the earth, and I shall act as interpreter. May we put them to you, and record for our friends, to bring home with us, the sound of your voices in the phonograph?"
I consented at once, and he placed a phonograph (of a different form to ours) near my mouth. For some five hours I then had a strange series of questions put to me, which I answered as best I was able—some of them relating to topics about which I had never thought, and which I honestly believe (having done a good deal of variorum reading) never yet have been discussed on earth. Others were far simpler, but I found a great difficulty in making my replies understood. Especially in religious questions I found this difficulty. None of the three evidently could understand how, if Christianity witnessed so strongly to the doctrine of love, Christians could so quarrel with each other on religious topics. That any one could be angry on religion none of them evidently could understand. It was an insoluble problem. They said that if people are in error we should feel pity, not anger; that truth could not be manifold, but one; and that passion must tend to encourage error, rather than to destroy it. Then they passed on to another mystery—the origin of war. They could not see why or wherefore men should try to hurt, or, still worse, to kill, one another. Surely there was enough misery in the world without adding to it? This led to politics. The political divisions of Europe, the quarrels of nations and their mutual jealousies, the different forms of government, even the diversity of languages,—all seemed to them very mysterious. On every matter they not only asked me what was the case on earth, but why things were as they were. As I, like most people, had taken things much as I found them, the causes of our social phenomena were very puzzling. In not a few matters, when pressed hard, I had to reply, that all this must be the result of sin, and of man's Fall, and if men were better things could not be in such a state. I must own it was painful to give these strangers so unfavourable an idea of humanity and of our earth, but there was no help for it.
Then we turned to other topics—to the mysteries of Nature, to the laws of death, and pain, and disease. Here new difficulties arose, and I had again to plead the Fall and man's sin. It seemed they knew of no pain, only under certain unfavourable circumstances, e.g., on Saturn, or amid the burning regions of Jupiter, they had felt a certain difficulty of existence; pain—localised pain—they had never felt. I found, however, they were not sure that they would under all circumstances be secured from death, or rather "would have to seek a new form of corporeal existence," as Aleriel put it; but they always had evaded this by precautions, and by their intense and renewable vitality.