88 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



the creation of the mind of man. So also the eighth day, 

 which will by my Table of Trinity give to man Comprehension 

 as well as Imagination, or two-thirds of the faculties of the 

 soul of wisdom, is the right day to mark the commencement 

 of agriculture which was the first development of the compre- 

 hension of how to use nature's gifts, just as the following, 

 the ninth day, is the correct place for the start of human will 

 and civilisation ; and human will is the dawn of Understanding 

 in the mind of man. So with the eighth day, the Age of Agri- 

 culture and the Age of Cain, we start the stone age of geology ; 

 and as agriculture gave rise to possession of property, which 

 is in its turn, for the first time in the course of nature, to 

 create a vicious inducement for robbery and murder, so is not 

 this stone age correctly depicted in the Bible as the age of 

 murder ? For this Epoch of Hope, which starts with the Age 

 of Cain, the Stone Age, is to be the epoch of energy, robbery, 

 wars and murder and ingenuity, till in the next one hundred 

 years or so we are to abolish international wars and so complete 

 this epoch of wars and murder, which will bring to a close the 

 second seven days of creation that make up the Epoch of Hope 

 in which man is to see and believe, with the help of woman and 

 Christ, in a future soul he has yet to win in the seven days to 

 come which will make up the Epoch of Charity when he is to 

 learn by science to know and understand the truths religion 

 is to teach him to see and believe. 



But God withdraws the faculty of memory and replaces it by 

 an indistinct power of recalling the knowledge and experience 

 of our previous ancestors who were possessed of the same class 

 of mind as is reborn in ourselves so as to permit of the evolu- 

 tion of civilisation, whereby, instead of recalling the exact 

 memories and experiences of past events, man is now only 

 able to recall such images of the past as a recurrence of events 

 reduplicates in his present life, and to embellish them by the 

 additions of his vivid imagination as described in the chapters 

 on Laws of Descent, and Mind and Soul, a process which 

 enables him to improve upon the knowledge of the past, and 

 which places his powers of thought on the upward road towards 

 reason, and makes him from this time far superior to any 

 other animal in creation. But this power to recall is, I am 

 inclined to think, confined to the experiences of such ancestors 

 as have possessed minds of like qualities as those which we 



