CAIN AND ABEL 125 



thousand million years to evolve Matter from Gas. I only put 

 these as approximate calculations. I mention them here for 

 the sake of illustrating to some slight extent how rapid has 

 been the evolution of the mind of mankind as compared with 

 that of the Universe and that of his body, that it may encour- 

 age us to combine together to evolve our souls of happiness. 



We find that approximately it has only taken three to five 

 hundred thousand years to evolve man's mind by incessant 

 fighting, yet it took between seven and twelve million years of 

 swinging from bough to bough, instead of crawling along the 

 boughs, as other apes did, before they were able to alter the 

 muscles of the body by transforming the tail into other muscles 

 to suit the upright posture and keep the stomach, bowels and 

 lungs in their new positions, and over twenty million years to 

 evolve an upright posture. I cannot go into details here, for 

 this transformation stage would fill a volume in itself. Yet I 

 take it that all apes who evolved perfection in this upright 

 position, and perfection in murder and cannibalism, had 

 attained the trinity of perfection that was to raise them to the 

 standard of man, and so became men. This marked their 

 perfection^ the Epoch of Faith, and so they became Lucifers, 

 or perfect devils of beastliness, and so were fit to receive a 

 mind that in this Epoch of Hope was to evolve, perfection in 

 courage, cruelty and selfishness, the three qualities that were 

 to make the greatest virtues of the past three hundred thou- 

 sand years, which were to be marked as being the ages in 

 which mankind was to evolve Religion, Government and Com- 

 merce, for the evolution of which these qualities would be 

 required ; to do which he must first attain perfection in these 

 arts, and those of war, energy and perseverance, in just the 

 same manner as it was necessary for him to excel in murder 

 and brutality in the Epoch of Faith. 



So we find the pendulum of power is constantly 

 swinging from selfishness, cruelty and war on the one side to 

 love, order and charity on the other, as the fight for supre- 

 macy lies between religions, law and order on the one side 

 and might versus right, commercial greed and individual am- 

 bition on the other. So the Epoch of Hope is to be the arena 

 in which we are to watch the alternate rise and fall of religion 

 after religion, Government after Government, Empire after 

 Empire, till Religion attains its full growth and perfect de- 



