84 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



reward of suffering and sacrifice, success of perseverance and 

 energy, wealth of economy and thrift, respect of honour and 

 justice, happiness of the good deeds and kind words and the 

 consideration we show to others. Content is the greatest 

 reward of all, because it is given only to those who never waste 

 their time, talents, or opportunities, and who ungrudgingly 

 and willingly perform each duty of each moment of their 

 lives, regardless of their own inclinations, ever striving to 

 make every act of their lives as useful as possible to those 

 amongst whom fate and circumstance throw their lot. 



Make these, I say, the rules of your life and you will be 

 as perfect as God deems it best for you to enable 

 you to best perform the ends for which he has placed you in 

 this world. You can then trust to him to reward you both in 

 this life and in the lives of your children with a full and over- 

 flowing measure of joy, pleasure and happiness. Make this 

 the religion of your life and you will be a religion unto your- 

 self ; but to be perfect on these lines requires more wisdom than 

 the world has yet evolved, and vastly more than man had two 

 hundred thousand years ago, so we must not wonder that his 

 first acts of reverence and devotion were to worship the sun, 

 moon and stars, for at this remote period his mind was very 

 material and little above the mind of an animal, and he could 

 not even imagine the existence of God. Low down in the 

 scale of religion as idolatry was, it was a mighty advance over 

 the previous animal conception of virtue, which was to live, 

 eat and sleep, for it taught him to worship nature as he was too 

 young to know his God. Out of this first dawn of imagination 

 grew religion, the child of fear and its concurrent evolution 

 veneration, as fear made man superstitious, so he appeals to 

 the seer and magician, whom his superstitions have developed, 

 and who are now to become his rulers and directors as they 

 were the men whose acute observation of nature had made 

 them better judges of the changes of the weather and better 

 able to forecast its dangers. Thus superstition, the mother of 

 religion, is brought into existence in the mind of man. 



These seers then realise that in superstition lies a force 

 more powerful than human strength, and which will enable 

 them to govern the wills of their strongest fellow-men. So we 

 now find from this onward the power of God the Mother begins 

 to rise through woman's love and fear to conquer man's will, 



