With a people in this temper the structure of the new Polity seemed rather the building up of a Church than the ordering of a Commonwealth.
Yet it truly resembled neither of these things. They determined that no written laws, no written book of religion, no formal creed should have a place among them. They had seen how law-making means law-breaking, and they determined that their rule of life should be simply this one thing—a principle, a passion, not a command; just this—Love to a living Lord, in whom they recognized the perfection of all that the mind of man can conceive as holiest and best, whom they knew to be among them always. In all troubles and difficulties they stretched out hands of prayer and proved His presence.
These being their thoughts, it was rather a furtherance of their work than a hindrance of it that all the books of the Priests had been consumed in the burning of the church. They did not attempt, as they might well have done, to reconstruct a book of Faith from the words and thoughts with which the memories of the Sister and some others were stored.
These were held all the more precious because they had to be told by one to another, and told again and again, till in the hearts of all were embedded as shining jewels fragments of perfect truth and flashes of mystical insight. Dearest to all were the parable of the Vine and Its branches, the Story of the Cross, the “Sermon on the Mount,” and many sayings such as these: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life;” “He that loveth his life shall lose it;” many words of St. Paul, and especially those which tell of the struggle of the soul to get free from the only real tyranny, and the splendid anarchy of the slaves of Christ; many sayings of Thomas à Kempis, of Tauler, of Molinos, and of Marcus Aurelius, dear to the heart of the Sister; many fragments of poems and hymns such as she loved and had learnt; many beautiful old hymns which some of the wives of the German Socialists remembered and sang. But it would not be possible even to hint at the chosen words which ruled the lives of that happy community, every voice in which swelled the sweet hymn of praise which rose at morn and even among the Bread-fruit groves. They did not assemble to worship or to sing, for they sang and worshipped everywhere.
No one called anything his own; and each was eager to find opportunities of helping others with his strength or his substance.
But as to the Dacoits, concerning them even the Prince was led to doubt the fitness of Anarchy. They were not, indeed, now so strong, or the rest of the community so weak, that they could not be forced to submit to laws; but they did not seem able to understand the very rudiments of that inner law which he saw was needful to the peace of a country ordered on the principles of which we have spoken.
So they were taken in calm weather in the Lagoon boats to a small neighbouring island, where they would find plenty of food, but no large timber of which boats might be built; and they were left there to work out for themselves the problem just solved on Meliora.
How long the Anarchy, which was truly a Theocracy, would have continued in unbroken peace cannot be known. It is possible that, though the children of the first settlers were passionately eager for settled order, and enthusiastically religious, their children might show a return of evil tendencies, and that those who did not remember the first fearful days of strife in the Island might wilfully have roused again a spirit of disorder; for the world and all the spheres mount only in upward spirals toward that point of the Heavens where they shall rest at last, and are turning always to the same point again, only a little higher than before.
What did happen was this.
Not long after the time of which I have written, the Sister having died, and been buried at her desire high up on the mountain, the Prince went one evening to sit by her grave awhile and to gather strength by communing with the spirit that had first led him into the way of gladness.