156 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



proceed to people the heavenly bodies with spiritual qualities 

 and inhabitants. So comes the belief also in a live spirit 

 world, which is in its next evolution to produce a belief 

 in the three first revelations of divine spirit rule, spirit life, 

 and immortality. This presumably takes the first two hun- 

 dred thousand years of evolution of mind and soul. 



We find that in early religions, the likeness to God in man 

 has not evolved sufficiently, for him to either comprehend the 

 revelation of spiritual life or immortality, nor for him to 

 realise the value of heredity or caste. Their religions teach 

 them none of these truths of revelation. Of the Chinese it is 

 said that their non-advancement is due to the legislation of 

 Confucius, who certainly is not the first redeemer or God- 

 made man, but might be the first historical mention of a 

 religious reformer of the Chinese redemption portrayed in the 

 Bible by Cain. But on this point it is impossible to do more 

 than conjecture, as there is no evidence to support any con- 

 jectures much less proof. Human legislation, though it 

 might be sufficient to stop bodily development and prevent the 

 loss of physical vitality, would not be enough to account for 

 the loss of spiritual powers of evolution, or the evolution of 

 virtue out of sin, nor for the loss of power to evolve mind. 



This can only be accounted for by their not having 

 passed through the trials of the glacial periods, thereby losing 

 the good results of such evolutions. Their minds were not 

 sufficiently developed to be able to be worthy of the influence 

 of subsequent acts of redemption, by more than one out of the 

 three redeemers, Buddha being the second (probably the Enos 

 of the Bible), who belonged to the Aryan race, and so their 

 spiritual evolution was not influenced, in such a manner as 

 would make it possible for their men to transmit the female 

 attribute of God, Comprehension, as well as the male one of 

 Imagination. Therefore they stopped short in the evolution 

 of the second portion of their souls, the power of Comprehen- 

 sion, and so lost the power to conceive the belief in one God 

 and His Trinity. This is the most probable solution of the 

 difficulty and would correspond to what stock-breeders term 

 " a want of cross-breeding " in soul, which might be just as 

 necessary for the development of soul, as it is necessary at 

 times to produce perfect variation in bodily breeding. This, 

 it seems to my mind, is the most probable way of accounting 



