Morning journal and courier., 1889-09-07

nous in their stern and unrelenting refusal to accept what you and know no other pos. sibility than to embrace. Instead, it would be nearer right to set them down as the one race on earth absolutely incapable of initia- tive formulation of the idea itself of God It IS common to hear the teachers and leads CTS say that no people exist who have not in herently an instinctive reverence for some form of primal creative power, or some sort of a supreme being. But here is one which I assert to be absolutely incapable of even the most trifing submission to deity. Ger tainly no one who has the most meager knowledge of gipsies will deny their intelli- gence. No other human beings live who are naturally so gifted with all-sufficient intel. lects. But so far as I am able to judge, they do not know how to think God; and the idea of 8 Savior, and the plan of re- demption as revealed and taught, are posi- lively so startling burlesque on reason and evidence by things by them known, seen and experienced, that no person can secure and retain their confidence and respect who will persist in presenting such ideas and proposi- tions to them. As have shown in a prece- ding article, there is no such thing as gipsy belief in future state. As life with them is considered no better than accident, death is the end. I will not say that they resist the idea of future existence. They have no belief about the matter whatever, and their resentment comes when you insist upon their having any. If there is such state, we'll and good. If not, still well and good. They do not know anything beyond the facts that physical hurt or disease and old age bring death. Death uecessitates putting the remains of the dead away in the ground. When the earth covers them they see no fur- ther. Their concerns, material and ethical, are invariably with the living. On these lines they are luminous, but lowly, order of agnostics. They seldom speak of the dead. In the two or three hundred gipsy ballads have collected there is not line, sentence or thought expressing faith in, or even hope for, reunion with the dead. even in gipsy lover's widest rawlings for his lost other-heart idol. The nearest approach to such sentiment is expressed not towards humans, but of animals, and conspicuously of the horse. have witnessed gipsy grief more poignant at the loss of loved horse than ever saw expressed over the death of father, mother, child, husband or wife; and on all occasions the loss of one of these prized animals begets an awe and silence in a gipsy camp most strange and inexplicable. Re- peatedly have l seen the entire members of Q band gather round an expiring animal with barred heads, woebegone faces and heart rending groans, interspersed with most pite- ous expressions from gipsy men at their ut- ter helplessress to save; and this to degree i that have often surmised it pointed to a belief, especially as the trappings of loved horse are always buried at it's death, in some condition of future existence where the ri- der would again vault his spirited steed. But all efforts to find and fix such faith have been unavailing.
 There are few who can believe any good possible among so faithless and hopeless 6 people. But there is good among them, and of kind the Christian world might better ! develop with very great consistency ard | profit. While gipsies are without faith, or ! even law, as we know it, no people live who ! more vigorously follow, in fact and to the ultimate of spirit, the highest and purest code of physical and moral observance. 1 They universally revere the marriage rela. tion. I say universally, and use that word
 unqualifedly. There Is not an exception, The religious faculty as we develop it, and sometimes distort it, being wholly lacking in these nemads, another seems to have taken
 its place. That is virtue worship. All this
 begins back of the sucking babe at itE
 mothers breast. It Is bred and inbred 1T
 home government and surveillance are suct
 that gipsy children grow unconscfously ant irrevocabIy into hereditarily virtuous live
 and loves. Believe 1t or not, gipsy men ant youths regard virtue of as noble perfec tion in men as in sweetheart or wife; ant some idea of the awful sacredness of thu
 primal requirement. in woman may bs hat
 when the fact is stated that any gipsy maid
 en found, on marriage, to have been UT
 chaste, is visited with the most horrible fai
 that can by any possibility come to her ! this life-uttef and endless repatriation; an
 more than once the lives of such have bee l sacrificed with the calm and unvarying aI
 proval of parents and friends; while such
 thing as disloyalty of husband to wife, C
 wife to husband, after marriage, has yet t
 be recorded of gipsy on the European c
 American continent.
 EDGAR l., WAKEHAN