136 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



So it was only by the growing fear and superstition of this 

 age that the fond and loving mother could influence her male 

 offspring and so pave the way for his acquirement of Love, 

 Sympathy and Charity from which his cruel, unsympathetic 

 and hard nature revolted. Hence this progress was necessarily 

 very slow, and woman wept many tears when she saw the boys 

 she had by her fond influence toned down to some sort of gentle 

 feeling, when they became men, throw all her lessons to the 

 wind as they neared maturity, and to revert to the vile devils 

 of cruelty their grandfathers had been, for prior to redemption 

 her daughters alone were amenable to the softer qualities. 



Hence when man was out fishing and hunting and 

 revelling in blood and destruction, many and many were the 

 tears of love that the mother sent up to heaven, and how much 

 more worthy they were, and perhaps far more virtuous and sin- 

 cere than those subsequently offered in latter days even though 

 they were clothed in superstition and offered to some dull and 

 senseless idol. No wonder that their constant knocking at 

 the door that we are assured will never for long remain shut 

 to those who earnestly and truly seek the truth in humility, 

 meekness and suffering, was at last opened and produced the 

 greatest of the only three miracles God intended to perform 

 in the whole course of creation to mark his prerogative to 

 govern mankind, should now be performed in this Epoch of 

 Religion, Love and War. For now the daughter of man is 

 by the grace of God the Mother of Creation to become incarnate 

 without the aid of man and so permit him to receive the power 

 to transmit her love of God and her neighbour to the hearts 

 of his male as well as female offspring. Yet owing to the 

 retrograde steps of evolution, after the birth of the first 

 redeemer, twenty or forty thousand years have scarcely 

 passed away, than all woman 's work, even with the help of 

 a God-made man to assist her to redeem mankind, is again 

 lost in the dense mists of idolatry and superstition, and God 

 the Mother has again to come to her assistance in the form of 

 Buddha, whose name only is historical, for the Buddha, who 

 was the founder of the earliest forms of Buddhism, most prob- 

 ably lived twenty or thirty thousand years before Christ. The 

 Buddha of modern Buddhism, Gautama, was in all probability, 

 it appears to me, only a later-date reformer who lived after the 

 people rebelled against the corruption of early Buddhism and 



