THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 155 



individualities and made of them gods to be worshipped. Now 

 one can realise that at this stage of his development what 

 conveys to his mind the highest source of Joy, Pleasure and 

 Happiness is a good feed, so it was only the natural outcome 

 of this stage of his mental development to advance a 

 step further and to offer sacrifice when prayers failed. For 

 our spiritual beliefs are but an imaginative extension of the 

 ideals of our present knowledge of existence and wants, and 

 at this stage his human experience was that when supplica- 

 tion to an earthly prince failed, a gift of value or of food often 

 gained the heart of a prince where all other appeals failed. 



Hence he naturally came to the conclusion that the 

 best way to appease the gods of his creation was to offer a 

 sacrifice of a portion of his wealth and property. Thus those 

 who had keener powers of imagination and observation began 

 to realise that herein lay a means of acquiring not only in- 

 fluence, but wealth, ease and comfort. These men therefore 

 devoted more care than ever to the study of indications of 

 atmospheric influences as a means to meteorological forecast, 

 the better to evolve agricultural advancement. And as man 

 attributed to the sun, moon and stars a supernatural power 

 they did not possess, the prophets and seers saw that by 

 pandering to his belief they could, if they increased their 

 knowledge of astronomy, gain an influence over their fellow- 

 men greater than all powers of arms. Thus grew up ideas of 

 a God-peopled heaven in the skies, which led to idolatry. 



But at first this led no further, and all the earliest 

 religions seem to have no more ideas of a reincarnation or of 

 future life than they had of God or Immortality. But as I 

 faintly illustrate in the birth of Christianity, there always 

 have been the two causes at work. The desire to govern by 

 religion on one hand, and by government on the other, con- 

 current with which is a gradual dawning of revelation of 

 divine truth as God's Trinity, is striving to shine through the 

 mists that surround man's yet unborn soul. So we now find 

 the two revelations, or the first two pieces of glass, in our 

 divine kaleidoscope begin to move, and form the two first 

 reflections of God in the soul of man as a belief in invisible 

 controllers (mind I say controllers, because as creator man's 

 mind had not yet evolved enough to imagine, let alone con- 

 ceive a creator) of the world and a future life. Thus they 



