THE EPOCH OF HOPE 71 



Before leaving the Epoch of Faith I must pause for a few 

 moments, if it is only for the sake of satisfying my reader and 

 helping him to follow the evolution of the mind and soul of 

 mankind on the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Days of Evolu- 

 tion, by asking him to bear in mind the fact that although I 

 speak of man's soul as existing in this epoch of the seven 

 days now under discussion, it is only present as a very 

 infantile soul, the perfection of which he is not to receive till 

 after the year A.D. 1800, when the evolution of human wisdom 

 really begins to develop. So in reality it would be far more 

 correct for me to say the evolution of the human mind out of 

 the animal mind, for it is only the dawn or conception of his 

 soul that is now taking place. Nevertheless, it appears to me 

 that this is quite the correct place to assign to the development 

 of his soul in evolution, as it is also the place assigned to it in 

 Genesis ; and also the place for me to insert it in my Tables 

 of the marriages of God's Trinity, as I have done in Table 

 III., and as its evolution has here taken place in the course of 

 creation, evolution, we find, coincides with Table III., and the 

 rest of the marriages then again coincide with the days of 

 Evolution. 



We now come to the evolution of man's mind, and find 

 that man, through having become the fiercest of all the apes, 

 and the best fighter and hunter, and through perfecting his 

 energy by swinging from bough to bough by his arms, instead 

 of crawling on his hands and feet, has now acquired the pos- 

 session of a body capable of maintaining a mind through the 

 acquisition of an upright posture, and so has brought himself 

 under the influences of the upward and downward currents of 

 electricity, which are to develop the powers of mind and soul ; 

 so he is now fit to receive the infant soul we call mind. This 

 has not been the work of a day, for to acquire this upright 

 position and to develop habits of perseverance has been a long 

 fight, extending over a period exceeding more than ten million 

 years, yet so slow is the development of the body as compared 

 with that of the mind, that in less than half a million years he 

 has developed his mind up to its present standard. Never- 

 theless, nothing does more to show us how insignificant is our 

 individual life than its comparison with the slow development 

 of evolution. For the hairs of our forearms from the wrist 

 to the elbow still retain the ape direction, and lie from the 



