I felt at hearing such
youthful and innocent lips speak of the absurdity of religious forms,
ceremonies, and creeds. She regarded my belief in them as a species of
barbarism. But she had not convinced me. _I was resolved not to be
convinced._ I believed she was in error.

Surely, I thought, a country so far advanced in civilization, and
practicing such unexampled rectitude, must, according to my religious
teaching, have been primarily actuated by religious principles which
they had since abandoned. My only surprise was that they had not
relapsed into immorality, after destroying church and creed, and I began
to feel anxious to convince them of the danger I felt they were
incurring in neglecting prayer and supplication at the throne to
continue them in their progress toward perfection of mental and moral
culture.

I explained my feelings to the Preceptress with great earnestness and
anxiety for their future, intimating that I believed their immunity from
disaster had been owing to Divine sufferance. "For no nation," I added,
quoting from my memory of religious precepts, "can prosper without
acknowledging the Christian religion."

She listened to me with great attention, and when I had finished, asked:

"How do you account for our long continuance in prosperity and progress,
for it is more than a thousand years since we rooted out the last
vestige of what you term religion, from the mind. We have had a long
immunity from punishment. To what do you attribute it?"

I hesitated to explain what had been in my mind, but finally faltered
out something about the absence of the male sex. I then had to explain
that the prisons and penitentiaries of my own land, and of all other
civilized lands that I knew of, were almost exclusively occupied by the
male sex. Out of eight hundred penitentiary prisoners, not more than
twenty or thirty would be women; and the majority of them could trace
_their_ crimes to man's infidelity.

"And what do you do to reform them?" inquired the Preceptress.

"We offer them the teachings of Christianity. All countries, however,
differ widely in this respect. The government of my country is not as
generous to prisoners as that of some others. In the United States every
penitentiary is supplied with a minister who expounds the Gospel to the
prisoners every Sunday; that is once every seven days."

"And what do they do the rest of the time?"

"They work."

"Are they ignorant?"

"Oh, yes, indeed;