THE EPOCH OF HOPE 77 



without the assistance of man. So God decided that God the 

 Mother should conceive three men the sons of God and thus 

 enable woman to transmit the powers of Love and Belief in 

 religion to her grandsons as well as to her granddaughters; 

 for it was necessary he should be able to receive religion 

 thousands of years before he was sufficiently advanced to re- 

 ceive a soul capable of fully understanding the truths of divine 

 revelation, an act that otherwise only woman would have been 

 capable of, and under such circumstances man would not have 

 brought any refining influence into the evolutions of civilisa- 

 tion and government, nor have allowed religion to direct the 

 powers of Study, Science and Understanding which he is now 

 just beginning to develop, and all the salutary effects that 

 religion has produced would have been omitted out of our 

 civilisation, government and commerce ; wars would have been 

 carried to the verge of extinction ; cruelty and hate would have 

 made man wage vendetta upon vendetta through all time to 

 come ; governments would have been nothing but huge com- 

 bines of the mighty to rob, murder and oppress the weak, and 

 commerce would have justified all deceptions, no matter how 

 base, so long as profit had resulted. 



I will now endeavour to depict the most probable course of 

 the development of Imagination in the animal mind of man, 

 which is to make the first step towards the acquirement of a 

 soul, which will be the subject of our next chapter. But it is 

 just as well here to consider how the change was most pro- 

 bably brought about. As God withdrew His Soul and Love 

 from creation to create the universe, so now when he is going 

 to grant man a mind he withdraws memory from him so as 

 to permit of civilisation, and to allow the development of the 

 powers of conception as man evolves this first attribute of the 

 Trinity of the Human Soul, the spirit of Imagination. Now, 

 animals retain their power of memory and of thought. For 

 instance, they require no teaching in the required acts of their 

 lives, but on the other hand their powers do not extend to 

 study, conception or invention. The bird requires no archi- 

 tect to show it how to build its wonderful and intricate nest ; 

 the well-bred sheepdog requires no instruction how to work 

 sheep, but will round up a mob of ducks or geese when only 

 two or three weeks old as skilfully as an old dog works sheep. 

 Man may teach the dog to work to suit man's requirements, 



