THE EPOCH OF HOPE 95 



so we will have to renounce war, cunning and greed and practice 

 PEACE, UTILITY, and universal CHARITY in the week of 

 creation yet to come. Another law, for all evolution is a trinity 

 of progress, is that every evolution passes through three courses 

 or stages of individual evolution, each inferior to the succeed- 

 ing one, before it produces a virtuous result in the advancing 

 minority. Thus in the Epoch of Hope, being the age of 

 murder, three forms of murder are produced. First, the 

 murder of Adam and Eve or animal murder ; the murder of 

 Cain, or that of anger, when the stone weapons gave a new 

 impetus to warfare; thirdly, the murder of Lamech, murder 

 for the sake of robbery, when the metal age brought war to 

 such a state of advancement that it was henceforth to become 

 an efficient method of forcing opinions, whether right or wrong, 

 upon other people, the murder of national hate and bigotry, 

 and this at last made the evolution of religions and govern- 

 ments a possibility. 



I have now given my reader a glance at the most important 

 evolutions that are to make up this Epoch of Hope, and I have 

 advanced mankind to the stone age, or Age of Cain and Abel, 

 which I make the heading of my next chapter. We now advance 

 to the stone age where man gradually found the advantages of 

 fastening a stone to a stick, then of throwing it from a sling, 

 then to hurling his stick, and then a bow and arrow is evolved, 

 and so on till we have swords, battle-axes, Dreadnoughts, 

 submarines, Zeppelins, cannons, and asphyxiating gases, as . 

 the final end of this epoch which in the next hundred years or 

 so will bring the art of murder to perfection, after which we 

 will arrive at the age of Peace. So the first stages of his 

 superiority over the animal kingdom open up hitherto hidden 

 thoughts to the mind of man as he evolves this new faculty 

 of imagination which is from now to gradually grow and 

 enlarge until it attains to the present stage, age, or day of 

 Invention. So man gradually arrives at the stage mentioned 

 in the beginning of this chapter where we find him starting 

 to build some sort of a house, which marks the dawn of civilisa- 

 tion and agriculture ; then as his imagination becomes more 

 developed he gets a step further by becoming a gardener, 

 thereby becoming an individual property-holder, stores his 

 wealth and so becomes an object of envy to his less thrifty and 

 less energetic neighbour, who is now tempted to rob and 



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