THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 159 



rise of Lucifers, the Garden of Eden and the Ages of Adam 

 and Eve, Cain and Abel, of Noah and of the Flood, and the 

 creation of the soul of man, are all so many of the truths of 

 evolution buried in the rubbish heaps of superstition invented 

 by the mind of man to dim the overwhelming lustre of the 

 light of God's revelations, and to make religion useful as a 

 tool of government and of revolutions, and so assist man's 

 upward advance. I have now tried to illustrate how this 

 cloak of superstition was necessary -in the past, and, so far as 

 I am able, wish to show how man must now endeavour to 

 make it the duty of science and evolution, so far as possible, 

 to remove the garb of superstition and bigotry so as to help 

 him to evolve his soul of Understanding and to be able to 

 read aright the ethics of the past. To do this I feel sure 

 we must read evolution in conjunction and by the light shed 

 upon it by the hypothesis of the Trinity of God, or else it 

 will only have the retrograde effect of reducing every particle 

 of knowledge back to the materialism of the past, which has 

 been the main cause of the non-advancement of the Chinese 

 and other uncivilised nations by stopping further advancement 

 in the knowledge of divine revelations, and be as big a clog 

 to the wheels of progress as the material religions of China and 

 other eastern and uncivilised nations have been to their 

 advancement. 



Thus Noah marks the stage of evolution we have now arrived 

 at in our discussion, for we have now come to the end of the 

 Glacial Period, or age of deluges and floods, when man has 

 to build rafts to rescue his family and stock, as these periods 

 of rain, cold and snow drove him back into warmer climates. 

 This same cold and frost made him invent alcoholic drinks 

 and stimulants, illustrated by the drunkenness of Noah, so 

 that we see that in our biblical rubbish heap is buried the 

 proof of the order and sequence of these stages of evolution 

 which are a proof that the marriages of God's Trinity are 

 the key to the understanding of evolution and of religion also. 



Here we have the three greatest events of this age, the 

 Deluge, the invention of rafts, that was afterwards to evolve 

 shipping, and the discovery of the value of liquor as a powerful 

 preventive of death from cold, which are made the typical 

 acts of the mythical personifications of this age which are 

 represented in the Bible by the account of the life of Noah. 



LL 



