THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 165 



by the custom of caste leading to such an extreme of arrogant 

 autocracy on the part of the princes and patriarchs that the 

 masses of the people rose in rebellion and expelled them. For 

 the student of evolution who realises how slow is the evolution 

 of any such custom before it can leave any lasting mark on the 

 habits or manners of a nation, knows at a glance that any 

 custom that could leave so marked an effect as that of Hindoo 

 caste behind it, and that could last for two or three thousand 

 years, must have taken anywhere from twenty to fifty thousand 

 years to evolve, so would run back a long way into prehistoric 

 ages. Such an Hypothesis alone would account for the extra- 

 ordinary attempt made by later Buddhist teachers attempting 

 to place an omnipotent and infinite God in a finite body. 

 These tenets as taught about five hundred to one thousand 

 years B.C. are but the natural outcome of an attempt to deprive 

 an omnipotent being of his superhuman attributes. Although 

 evolution is often prone to degenerate, if an effect 

 points to a higher development as its cause, you are generally 

 not far wrong in assuming that at some prior date such a 

 belief has existed, for it is contrary to evolution to proceed 

 for any length of time in a retrograde march. It only retraces 

 its steps to advance in another direction. 



These migrations not only transformed the national 

 character of peoples by the intermingling of blood relation- 

 ships, but by interchange of ideas, and religious beliefs in 

 like manner produced marked advancement in religious belief 

 and more advanced conceptions in man's mind of the truths of 

 the divine revelation ; truths it is only possible to understand 

 as humanity increases its knowledge of the truths Nature is 

 ever slowly revealing to mankind. Thus the Persians, being 

 the most advanced students of their day in the science of 

 Astronomy, gave a more concrete interpretation to the 

 Buddhist abstract conception of One God in a trinity of 

 persons, and out of the Buddhist belief in the transmigration 

 of souls grew a belief in a supernatural heaven and a life to 

 come. While there the Mosaic people picked up many of the 

 legends of Assyrian history, notably the giving of the Ten 

 Commandments, and the finding of Moses (undoubtedly Sargon 

 I. of Assyria) in the bulrushes, etcetera. Two of these branches 

 of this emigration finally drifted into Palestine; the first 

 became the founder of Jerusalem when expelled from the throne 



