208 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



not condemn the father who prevented his children becoming 

 men by always keeping them in the nursery and administering 

 the cane when they had past thirty years of age, as destroying 

 the highest of their qualities, self-control. So we are now 

 nearing the manhood of Government and Science, and it 

 becomes a duty of the teachers of religion to make their 

 teaching up-to-date, or their flocks will cease to obey them, 

 just as much as the child will revolt from the father who does 

 not recognize that he is becoming a man, or the nation will 

 refuse to obey the laws that custom and society condemn as 

 being obsolete. Hence, if we would stop religions losing their 

 beneficial influence, we must see that they do not neglect to 

 adjust their teaching to modern requirements, at the same 

 time as they uphold social customs, and, above all, that they 

 urge respect and obedience to state authority, and inculcate 

 habits of energy and justice and rectitude, rather than super- 

 stitious rites, bigoted animosities and intolerant hatred. 



The duty of religion is to act as a brake on the errors 

 that greed, love of power, and discontent with our Ipt in life 

 are constantly causing to arise, in the evolution and execution 

 of State Government, and so act as the mouthpiece of the 

 people to offer passive remonstrance to the misjudgment of 

 State Government. We must not forget that the clergyman 

 is human as well as the statesman and professor, and that 

 being equally human is equally liable to err. The cure of 

 the evils that have often set priests, statesmen and professors 

 at war in the past, so causing wars and revolutions, must He 

 in these three masters of social regulation realising that the 

 time has come when their united action must be combined to 

 work out the salvation of humanity, in conformity with the 

 laws of nature and evolution-, by assisting the survival of the 

 fit, not the preservation of the unfit. Thus only can they 

 reduce the inmates of our jails and stop the necessity for state 

 punishment. Religion must raise the best of mankind by 

 devoting its energy to producing higher ideals, and in this 

 way urge men to higher virtue and help the willing worker to 

 rise in the social scale, but to be this it must uphold the laws 

 of state and society and inculcate veneration, obedience and 

 respect to authority, not inculcate equality, for there will be 

 no more equality in heaven than there is on earth. Man must 

 raise himself by nobly fighting the battle of life, or God will 



