THE ETHICS OF REVELATION 135 



now beginning to evolve in the course of creation, you will 

 comprehend the wisdom of the course he has pursued. He has 

 surrounded each one of us by pure and perfect revelations, 

 as taught by a true knowledge of the laws of nature, abiding 

 the time when the mind of man shall have evolved sufficiently 

 to be capable of understanding them. These early and pre- 

 sent teachers of religion have had, and most probably will still 

 have for many centuries yet to come, to adjust their teachings 

 to the puerile development of man's mind, and to do this had 

 to clothe their dogmas in multitudinous cloaks of variegated 

 colours and textures of superstition and bigotry, to dim the 

 splendour of God's Majesty that it might attract and not 

 frighten man's weak and imperfectly developed mind. 



Hence the knowledge of evolution can only serve one 

 purpose; and what is more, evolution is the only means 

 by which true revelation can be obtained, or has been obtained 

 in the past, for it is only by the pressure and influences of the 

 struggles of evolution in past ages that mankind has become 

 aware of the existence of such revelations as he is possessed of 

 (see the chapter on the Evolution of Religion in Book II.), 

 that is by the light of God and His Trinity, by which light we 

 will be able to understand and sift these truths of revelation 

 from the mountains of superstition that have concealed 

 them from our view for millions of ages, and so in the future 

 one religion will replace another as they have done in the 

 past in the onward course of evolution, retaining the truths 

 and discarding the falsehoods and creating new and more 

 beautiful religious ideals in place of those they destroy, 

 brighter and richer by the fresh revelations that they have 

 brought to the light of man's lamp of understanding. 



Thus each destruction of an existing form of reli- 

 gion and reconstruction by another form of divine en- 

 lightenment is only a fresh step along the onward march 

 of religious evolution to keep pace with the upward evolution 

 of man's mind as the, growth of his soul increases his powers 

 of comprehension and understanding in the ethics of religion, 

 theology, and the ever-dawning ethics of revelation ; and a 

 more perfect knowledge of the mysterious being he acknow- 

 ledges as his creator becomes daily more comprehensible to his 

 understanding with every advance of religion and science, as 

 science and evolution remove the curtains of fable, parable, 



