THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 161 



mind of man that nature will not admit the possibility of two 

 supreme human rulers. Thus grows the belief in One God. 

 Once this step is taken, the powers of light, heat and motion 

 that ruled the Epoch of Faith give birth to the truths of 

 God's Trinity, which in reality is the revelation that is from 

 this time to be the belief that will henceforth rule creation 

 which like all seed, once the germination commences, must 

 burst its way through the soil, no matter how hard it may be ; 

 and revelation is but the seed God has planted in the mind of 

 man awaiting the time when the evolution of the world shall 

 produce the right season, watered by the rains of divine inspi- 

 ration to start its growth. Then comes its realisation as 

 civilisation advances; and as man learns to create and invent 

 religious beliefs, he realises that He who has an unlimited 

 power to control nature, must also have an unlimited power 

 to create. So the mystery of God, the Creator, is also evolved, 

 as well as that of God the Supreme Ruler. 



Thus become active the two greatest of all the 

 lights of revelation. Such revelations have lain buried 

 like a seed planted too deep in the soil, or sheltered by an 

 excess of overhanging boughs, which lies dormant for 

 ten or a hundred years, but which, nevertheless, when turned 

 up by the plough or when the mighty forest that obscures 

 the sun is burnt down, springs into life from amongst the 

 ashes. So with the revelations out of which are to grow the 

 firm belief in fatality and subservience of man to the will 

 of God, seeds which were sown in the Glacial Period, to be 

 thereafter obscured by the religious teaching of idolatry, but 

 to burst again into life in the teachings of Buddha, to be 

 buried again by the civilisations of India, Persia and Rome, 

 whose love of vice and luxury in time destroyed the original 

 purity of revelations which God through nature, made known to 

 mankind. These again become lost in the mist of super- 

 stition and bigotry of these forms of civilisation as 

 their governments are evolved out of the decay of 

 their religions. Because man's frailty and inability to evolve 

 two virtues at once causes him to allow his religious ideals 

 to fade and die for want of being cultivated, manured and 

 watered by intense sympathy and devotion and concentration 

 of national enthusiasm, which qualities it has transferred from 

 the evolution of religion which it has advanced a step up the 



