2 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



to strip off the cloaks of superstition and bigotry which have 

 clothed Revelation in the past. And Faith the first, and Hope 

 the second Epoch of Creation are then complete. In the Epoch 

 of Hope man is no longer to blindly obey what God decides as 

 in the stages of Matter, Plant and Animal Life, which was the 

 order of the day in the Epoch of Faith. He is now fit to receive 

 a mind or partial soul, and he has now to get the seal patent of 

 his Immortality, which is to place him forever above the 

 angels, i.e., the animals, for now, by sin being able to merit 

 reward, he is able to attain to virtue and immortality, which 

 was denied to the animals. For Virtue is sin carried by tempta- 

 tions overcome to the feet of Wisdom, and Vice is sin carried 

 by frailty to the feet of Folly, and man's duty in the future 

 will be to sin wisely, that is without offence to nature or his 

 fellow-men ; for man free from all sin, when immortal and 

 perfect, would be God's equal, and the existence of more than 

 one perfect infinite being is a logical absurdity. Hitherto God 

 has devoted fifteen to twenty millions of years to the creation 

 of Man's body, and hundreds of millions to creating the worlds 

 of angels (or animals), for the term angels as used in the 

 Biblical account evidently implies that Mammoth creation 

 which was the animal existence ruled by the instinct of the 

 animal and the power of God's will, and so, being sinless, were 

 man's superiors in good acts, but not in virtue. 



We have now arrived at the Epoch of Hope, wherein Love, 

 the second personality of God the Mother, is to conquer the 

 devil, man, who has been evolved out of the fallen angels, who, 

 though at first Man's superiors in size, shape and goodness, 

 stopped short of becoming devils by not learning to sin by the 

 time the earth had cooled below one hundred and forty degrees, 

 after which no further rapid or marked bodily development 

 remained possible, so they were thereby unable to evolve either 

 mind or soul, or acquire virtue, their progress ceasing at in- 

 stinct and thought. Now, the human mind commenced with 

 Imagination and Conception ; Reason commences with Compre- 

 hension, and Belief and Wisdom with Understanding. After 

 this the struggle of Evolution is to take the form of a contest 

 between the human devil that mankind has now created, and 

 civilisation, law, order, justice and mercy, in which fight Re- 

 ligion, the product of man's fear and woman's love, is to take 

 up the cudgels through the second seven days of creation that 



