THE EPOCH OF FAITH 19 



create Commerce, establish Religions, and evolve as the result 

 of their reaction the Virtues of Love, Sympathy, Mercy and 

 Unity, and Justice in the days yet to come. We will notice, 

 therefore, in this Epoch that as the Spirit of God the Mother 

 slowly returns to creation, these virtues gradually become 

 evolved, not at once, but as in the course of this warfare 

 each evolution destroys the other, to be thereafter rebuilt in 

 a more magnificent style as religion teaches us to see and 

 believe what we cannot understand. But in the Epoch of 

 Charity Religion is to be married, not as in the past to Imagi- 

 nation and Comprehension, only, but to Understanding also, 

 the third person of the soul of God in man, as Knowledge and 

 Science add the soul of the Wisdom of Understanding to his 

 past development when he will be able in future to supersede 

 his past beliefs by a clearer comprehension of right and wrong. 

 It must be clear to enlightened minds that as this evolution 

 takes place past religions must be reformed by the increased 

 knowledge of Science till man will in the future become a 

 religion to himself. Now even in the present enlightened age 

 of creation (for the Sun of Understanding as yet only " stands 

 tip-toe on the misty mountain-top ") there are very few men 

 who have attained the ideal of perfection and who do no wrong 

 I do not say that they are without sin, for such a state of 

 perfection, as I have tried to point out in this treatise, will not 

 even exist when earth becomes heaven, but whose sins are so 

 safeguarded by wisdom that they injure no one and so do no 

 wrong to others, which is the most we can hope to attain. But 

 as this stage of Evolution extends into the future, it would 

 require the gift of prophecy to discuss it. In the next few 

 chapters I will endeavour to make a comparison of the prin- 

 cipal facts of Evolution with Tables II. and III., so that the 

 reader may be in a position to draw his own conclusions and 

 extend the comparison as his knowledge dictates, and will leave 

 him to form his own ideas from such comparisons in the past as 

 to what the probable evolution of the future will be if thought 

 out with the aid of the results of Tables I., II. and III. 



