THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 169 



evolved in the hereditary customs of feudalism and be made 

 clearer of understanding to the world by Professor Darwin's 

 inculcation of the laws of the survival of the fittest, laws which 

 God has asserted and reassured throughout the whole of 

 Genesis and the whole course of evolution. 



Now I must return to the parent and strongest seed, 

 that of One God and His Trinity. To still further evolve it 

 and to prevent its becoming destroyed as the other revelations 

 had been when planted in the fertile lands of advanced civilisa- 

 tion, God, after giving it a temporary cultivation in the highest 

 civilisation cf the day, the rich mental soils of Persia and 

 Assyria, where it probably picked up the Ten Commandments, 

 and possibly the teachings of trinity, or it was further en- 

 larged upon, just as in Egypt it most probably evolved the 

 dogma of the immortality of the body, and in Greece that of 

 the existence of a heaven in the skies, and in Persia the 

 immortality of the soul was further enlarged upon. These are 

 items in support of which I might fill a volume, but which in 

 the present case I can only pause to allude to, and will content 

 myself with remarking that all these teachings are destined 

 subsequently, after the birth of Christianity, to be picked up 

 and incorporated into the later forms of religious beliefs during 

 the days of the Roman Empire. We now find that to pre- 

 serve the precious doctrines of God and His Trinity, the early 

 pilgrims fled from India some two to three thousand years 

 before Christ, and having picked up the Ten Commandments 

 from the Medes and Persians, who were at this time advanced 

 to the highest pinnacle of civilisation reached at this stage of 

 creation, carried these teachings into Palestine, for the Ten 

 Commandments appear to be a summary of Assyrian laws. 



Many of these ancient doctrines are now transplanted 

 to the poorest possible soil, that of Palestine, which 

 we read was the dumping ground of the outcasts of 

 Egypt, and Persia and the Hittite kingdoms. No possible 

 surroundings could appear less suitable in the judgment of 

 man, for the cultivation and growth of so choice a dogma, 

 but the ideas of God and mankind often differ. For when we 

 consider that the religion of the Hebrews and the Canaanites 

 who peopled Palestine was the worship of Baal and Astarte 

 before the coming of the Jews from Egypt about 1800 B.C., 

 and the influx of the Mosaic people about 900 B.C., not as is 



