54 THE PORTAL OF EVOLUTION 



unalterable law of descent, or, in other words, the survival of 

 the fittest, so that all of us that have not lost our chance of 

 immortality may say with Christ : " Before Abraham I am." 

 Think, oh you who are tempted to selfishly injure your neigh- 

 bour by being indolent, wasteful or vicious, before you con- 

 demn some, if not all, of your children or their children's 

 children to lose their souls before becoming eternal, for then 

 God will not grant you a new soul, and you will ultimately 

 condemn them by your sins to lose their chance of Immortal 

 happiness, as the earlier creation of plants and animals have 

 already done, and their souls can then only be absorbed by the 

 souls of those who prove themselves better fitted to survive. 



A soul that God has, by millions of years of evolution, 

 handed down to you to still further bring to perfection if you 

 have the courage and energy to devote to your duty and the 

 good of the rest of your fellow-men, and which if you fail to 

 do, your children will in the course of evolution become 

 " blocks and stones and senseless things," condemned to eter- 

 nal damnation or at best to be absorbed by those who are de- 

 scended from families who have not wasted their opportunities 

 or prostituted their love of God and their fellow-men. Oh, do 

 not destroy that image of Himself in your soul that can alone 

 grant to your children the power of regaining in future ages 

 the possibility of attaining an appreciable likeness to the Soul 

 of God the Holy Ghost which was withdrawn that creation 

 might exist, and the attainment of which is to be the ultimate 

 reward of those who persevere to the end in the fight to be the 

 fittest and most useful and most charitable of mankind ; par- 

 ticularly those whose charity takes the form of kind acts, 

 deeds, and the forgiveness of their neighbours' faults, and who 

 assist others in the battle of life, rather than acts of alms- 

 giving, except in such cases as really call for relief. For we 

 must always remember that advice given unasked is imperti- 

 nence in disguise, and assistance unrequired in the same way 

 destroys the spirit of self-reliance and energy, which are and 

 always will be the highest virtues. So indolence and the 

 reliance on the bounties of others always produce loafers and 

 unemployables, who are the greatest of all criminals. For 

 heaven is, as the Scriptures state, only for those who gain it 

 11 by the sweat of their brow," that is to say b}^ mental or 

 physical labour. 



