i86 THE PORTAL OF EVOLUTION 



seizing in his hand the child of his own loins, he ruthlessly 

 tears it to pieces and devours it before the weeping eyes of its 

 devoted and long-suffering mother. Is not this, I ask you, or 

 imagine if you can any circumstances that could appeal more 

 strongly at the foot of the throne of God's Mercy than the 

 above, or try and think if you can imagine any more appro- 

 priate place for the commencement of man's redemption by 

 God and woman than this one that our Marriages of God's 

 Trinity, in Table III., and evolution in its course and in 

 Genesis, all point out to be the right place for the dawn of 

 man's soul and the evolution of his mind. Is it any wonder 

 that God answered such prayers as I have asked you to 

 imagine, by sending the first redeemer to mankind at this age 

 of creation, " When Adam knew his wife Eve; who conceived 

 and brought forth Cain, saying I have gotten a man through 

 God " ? As I will explain elsewhere, Cain is probably typical 

 of the age of evolution, in which Imagination, the first trinity 

 of the soul of man, dawns upon the world. 



When we try to read Genesis and Evolution, together 

 with the hypothesis I am endeavouring to explain, evolution 

 points to the probability that both in the age of Cain and Abel, 

 and in the age of Seth and Amos, which biblical names appear 

 to personify the first and second redeemers of mankind, who 

 apparently existed, not as individual men but as personifica- 

 tions of evolutions or changes in the course of mental evolution 

 and civilisation, which evolutions become personified as some 

 greater expounder of the religious evolution that was in course 

 of being evolved, became a more concrete philosophy in place 

 of the abstract realisation of some innate revelation that man 

 in the course of the evolution of his mind was becoming con- 

 scious of, as he strove to imagine the possible why and where- 

 fore of the mysteries of transmogrification that he beheld going 

 on round about him in nature. Apparently such truths of 

 divine inspiration were being evolved and slowly making their 

 forces felt as a controlling influence upon his habits, customs 

 and powers of understanding, as the emotions of his human 

 mind and soul were in the course of evolution being slowly 

 evolved out of his animal instinct. The period of these evolu- 

 tions may be approximately set down, the first as between 

 fifty or one hundred thousand years, which we may call the 

 Age of Cain and Abel ; the second, as the last twenty-five or 



