Spread faith by persuasion, not coercion

Spread faith by persuasion, not coercion is the Empress’s governing principle for religious conversion in the Blazing-World: belief, she maintains, must be instilled through gentle persuasion rather than forced upon people. Her method joins preaching, women’s religious instruction, and deliberately designed chapels, while the surrounding polity’s existing religious uniformity exposes a tension between willing conviction and institutional conformity.

Religious Uniformity and the Empress’s Aim

The Blazing-World’s priests describe a society with one religion and no diversity of opinion about the worship of God. Its people pray through petitions, humiliations, and thanksgiving, but the Empress finds the arrangements defective. Women are excluded from public religious assemblies and pray at home; priests and governors are made eunuchs to prevent marriage, which the authorities associate with disturbance in church and state. Against this established order, the Empress resolves to convert her subjects to her own religion and to create a congregation of women, with herself as its leader and instructor.

Her conversion project is therefore not simply an argument against religious force. It also introduces her own faith and institutions into a world whose inhabitants already share a single religion. The narrative places the Empress’s religious authority alongside her sovereign power, while showing that the means she chooses for conversion are instruction and persuasion rather than compulsion.

Preaching and the Congregation of Women

The Empress builds churches and establishes a women’s congregation, intending to teach its members the articles of her faith. She heads the group herself and preaches; the women, described as quick-witted and capable of sound judgment, become devout and zealous sisters in a short time. Their response extends beyond the congregation: the Empress gains extraordinary love from her subjects throughout the Blazing-World.

This episode gives the principle a practical form. The Empress does not impose belief by decree in the account of conversion; she teaches, preaches, and cultivates a community of worship. The congregation also creates a public religious role for women that the existing practice had denied them, though the passage presents this change as part of the Empress’s own religious program.

Chapels as Persuasive Instruction

To sustain devotion, the Empress worries that people may tire of religious truth and follow their own desires. She commissions the Worm-men to investigate a burning mountain and obtain the stone responsible for its flames. She also asks the Bird-men for a piece of the sun-stone; they say that taking it would diminish the world’s light, but offer instead to demolish one of the many stars. The resulting Fire-stone and Star-stone furnish two chapels built one above the other.

One chapel is lined with diamonds and holds the Fire-stone. Artificial pipes carry water onto the stone, making the room appear aflame while the stone remains wet. The other chapel is lined with Star-stone and gives a bright, comfortable light without heat. Both stand on pillars in the center of a dark, circular cloister, open to view, and revolve continuously in opposite directions. The Empress preaches warnings about the punishment of sin in the fiery chapel and offers comfort to those who repent in the Star-stone chapel, which serves as an emblem of Heaven. The arrangement makes religious teaching visible through contrasting spaces and sermons rather than through a threat of state violence.

Persuasion, Fear, and Political Order

The Empress’s method succeeds in converting the Blazing-World without compulsion or bloodshed, and she seeks to encourage other duties and employments in the same way. Her rationale distinguishes obedience from durable commitment: fear may make people obey, but it is less lasting and reliable than love. Persuasion is thus both a religious principle and a means of securing settled public conduct.

The account’s ideal of willing belief exists alongside an explicit concern with maintaining religious and political order. The Empress fears that devotion may fade and responds by constructing institutions and spectacles that continually teach its consequences and consolations. The text consequently presents persuasion as an alternative to direct enforcement, while also showing how sovereign authority shapes the setting, instruction, and practices through which belief is encouraged.