THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 149 



and industrial unrest of to-day. This can only be avoided 

 by science and all forms of religions and governments finding 

 a common meeting ground that shall combine the most essen- 

 tial truths of revelation with those of knowledge ; and by 

 banishing Ignorance and past prejudices of race, social dis- 

 tinctions, national animosity and religious hate, and so become 

 one happy family of united humanity ; content to buy and sell 

 national property as they would individual assets, and realis- 

 ing that it is better to pay millions to acquire possession of 

 new territory by purchase and to settle international disputes 

 by arbitration rather than to waste millions of lives and 

 millions of capital (which is only another word for millions of 

 livelihoods) in perpetuating national vendettas by going to 

 war. The age of family vendettas is now relegated to the 

 ages of past evolution, and it is high time that the more 

 dreadful vendettas of religions, nations, governments, races 

 and classes and mercantile strifes were hurried into the realms 

 of like oblivion. This digression should, by rights, form a 

 part of the final chapter, but I have inserted it here thinking 

 the points under review may be of service when reading the 

 next few chapters. 



The second force that has decided the trend of Religion, 

 we must remember, is, that all and every Religion that has 

 ever been invented by man and enlightened by God has always 

 been used as a means of government and as a tool of revolu- 

 tion. Therefore, any religion that is to be able to hold sway 

 in a country has always had to mould its existence, not by the 

 correctness of its teachings of the truths of revelation, but by 

 the suitability of its teachings to the government of the coun- 

 try and the manners of the people it has to direct. For God 

 takes care that the absolute truths of revelation are part of 

 every religion in exact proportion to the individual people's 

 powers of comprehension. And many of the most beautiful 

 revelations are to be found in the religions of the East in 

 Buddhism and Mahometanism, also the mythology of Rome 

 and Greece, India, Persia, and other Eastern countries furnish 

 us with some of the sweetest and most magnificent illustra- 

 tions of the revelations of the past, hidden and obscured though 

 they may be by the cloaks of superstition and idolatry. Thus 

 we find that Josephus, the great historian of the days of 

 Christ, and when the governor of Jerusalem was Pontius 



