The Project Gutenberg eBook, Erewhon Revisited, by Samuel Butler

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Title: Erewhon Revisited

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: March 20, 2005 [eBook #1971]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EREWHON REVISITED***

Transcribed from the 1916 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

EREWHON REVISITED
TWENTY YEARS LATER
Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by his Son

I forget when, but not very long after I had published "Erewhon" in 1872,
it occurred to me to ask myself what course events in Erewhon would
probably take after Mr. Higgs, as I suppose I may now call him, had made
his escape in the balloon with Arowhena. Given a people in the
conditions supposed to exist in Erewhon, and given the apparently
miraculous ascent of a remarkable stranger into the heavens with an
earthly bride--what would be the effect on the people generally?

There was no use in trying to solve this problem before, say, twenty
years should have given time for Erewhonian developments to assume
something like permanent shape, and in 1892 I was too busy with books now
published to be able to attend to Erewhon. It was not till the early
winter of 1900, i.e. as nearly as may be thirty years after the date of
Higgs's escape, that I found time to deal with the question above stated,
and to answer it, according to my lights, in the book which I now lay
before the public.

I have concluded, I believe rightly, that the events described in Chapter
XXIV. of "Erewhon" would give rise to such a cataclysmic change in the
old Erewhonian opinions as would result in the development of a new
religion. Now the development of all new religions follows much the same
general course. In all cases the times are more or less out of
joint--older faiths are losing their hold upon the masses. At such
times, let a personality appear, strong in itself, and made to seem still
stronger by association with some supposed transcendent miracle, and it
will be easy to raise a Lo here! that will attract many followers. If
there be a single great, and apparently well-authenticat