2i8 THE PORTAL OF EVOLUTION 



are to produce more perfect buds, flowers and seeds in the 

 future. Think of this before every act you perform if you 

 wish to learn the lessons that evolution teaches, and then tell 

 me if you can find a better master or teacher, or a greater 

 inducement to be virtuous than such a belief. Try to realise 

 how insignificant an aim, object or ideal is the mere struggle 

 of your individual life, or love of wealth or desire for pleasure 

 compared with the all-important fight for the good of 

 others that such a belief inculcates as the object of existence. 



For it is the good you do to others that brings happiness 

 and content in its wake. Try and realise how great and 

 eternal is the trust imposed upon you and how short and trivial 

 your material enjoyment of the momentary existence of your 

 individual life is when compared with the psj^chological 

 eternity of happiness that the unselfish use of the energy, 

 labour, and skill, demanded of you during the moment of the 

 material life that is given to you to enable you to lay the 

 foundation stone of an eternity of enjoyment, of the worthy 

 aims and ambitions you are permitted to set up as your ideals, 

 and which will, most probably, be the ideals of your children 

 for all eternity if you use the short space of your temporary 

 sojourn in your mortal body correctly, and which are to decide 

 whether or no your offspring are to move onwards towards 

 everlasting perfection, or are to be condemned to expiate your 

 neglected opportunities by eternal punishment ; to rise in the 

 social scale or decrease or stop breeding and so move onwards 

 towards extermination ; or, on the other hand, if you make 

 good use of your time, talents and opportunities for the good of 

 others, to be able to eradicate some unfitness for eternal perfec- 

 tion that your family may have evolved which may have been a 

 virtue in the past, but which has now, with the advance of 

 evolution, become a vice, and to perfect those in which your 

 family has excelled. For those in our family who tend to re- 

 produce such family traits as are no longer required by evolu- 

 tion have to be exterminated to make room for its more 

 advanced members or the children of other families who have 

 evolved to a higher standard of fitness than we can lay claim to. 



Nevertheless, the crimes or the failures of your family may 

 have done good, in which case you may be allowed the chance 

 to expiate them and so prolong the existence of your family 

 soul, for -their crimes may have produced virtues in others. 



