THE EPOCH OF FAITH 17 



minor views I may express. I have tried to make it as easy 

 as possible for him to use his own mind as the scales in which 

 to weigh the suppositions of my hypothesis, leaving him to 

 study history and evolution as a course of knowledge which, 

 with the guidance of this Hypothesis will, I feel sure, enable 

 those who like to adopt such a course to obtain a clearer and 

 better understanding of the revelations that bind one man's life 

 and interests to those of his fellow-men, that make one and 

 all of us by necessity dependent on the acts of each other, 

 and therefore ought to make each one of us realise that our 

 future advancement and evolution must depend on a better 

 understanding of the manner and objects for which we have 

 been created, and a more perfect realisation that any advantage 

 to the community, state or nation, or world at large, means a 

 like benefit to the individual, and that nothing can be a real 

 advantage to the individual that is detrimental to the commu- 

 nity. It is, therefore, only by adding to the public good that 

 we can benefit the conditions of the individual, and this is the 

 reason that all attempts to fix wages or profits by Act of Par- 

 liament have been and always will be failures, because they 

 benefit the individual at the cost of the community. 



And it appears to me that if I can demonstrate that the 

 hypothesis which these Tables contain follows the same course 

 as that followed by evolution, both in order of sequence and 

 in manner of procedure, and illustrate this connection during 

 the past fifteen thousand million years or so (the above being 

 the nearest estimate that I can arrive at), it is not beyond the 

 bounds of probability, and well within the limits of possibility 

 that the six succeeding days or stages of the world's evolution 

 will also be the same as these Tables mark out. 



The reader will now grasp that in this lies the importance 

 of the line of thought I am endeavouring to present to his 

 mind ; and if by doing so I can interest the man in the street 

 and get him to realise that in the evolution of the past lies 

 the only true finger-post to direct him along the road to his 

 final immortality, I feel sure it will be a step in the right 

 direction. And if it causes the more imaginative author and 

 the religious thinker to enter into partnership with the man 

 of science, they may be able to evolve a catechism of evolution 

 that will be a practical religious work of universal guidance 

 to mankind. Just as the writer of historical novels makes 



