The higher evolution

Front matter

THE IIGHER EVOLUTION

I HI

PHI

Preface

It is customary in this age to mention the parents, birth, and University schooling of a person seeking and holding high positions in the different walks of life. (What a fearful drawback custom and form are to development.) We suppose it is done with the belief that such mention in the papers about the birth, etc., will have a tendency to place said person in a higher estimation with the community at large though it ought not to do so. It reads something like this : " Mr. Smith was born at Albany, New York, of highly respected parents. His father was a Professor in the University of Michigan, and a member of different Societies. Mr. Smith graduated at Ann Arbor, and then entered the law business/'

We find many who have graduated from this or that school, yet their lives have and do amount to much less than some of those who have had but a common school education ; besides, it should not be considered that the former have better brains and thinking faculties because they have graduated from some University. We regret in a way that all cannot have a College or a University education, and yet such does not fit man for every occupation of greatness in life, though we are in the habit of laying, or may lay such as the foundation of the future of man. It is said " Herbert Spencer's aversion to linguistic studies put a University career vi PREFACE

out of the question. At the age of seventeen he entered the office of Sir Charles Fox and began work as a civil engineer.

" About eight years afterward he gave up this position, and devoted the whole of his time to Scientific experiments and studies, and to contributions on philosophical questions to various periodicals." It need not be said by me that Mr. Spencer has furnished us with wonderful truths along the line of Philosophy, because those who have read his works know this. It was not because he had believed such and such was the case thru a customary teaching and belief, but because he knew from practical and experimental methods, that such and such was the actual truth concerning such things.

It is the belief of the average person, or minister, or priest, that if a person enters a Theological Seminary and studies with the " belief " that such and such is the case in regard to Truth in the Christian life of man, thajt such persons are better qualified for the ministry of the Actual Truth, whether experience and observation have anything to do with making it a Truth. These people generally read and study systematically, rather than compare the verse they read with what they see existing, or with their own experience of what really exists, and because of this : it SEEMS TO SAY SO AND SO in the Bible to them, and is therefore only a " belief " formed without any understanding and experience.

It is amusing to read the objections offered by priests and ministers against those who give interpretations of words written in the Bible, because

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the latter have not been thru a Theological Seminary, when these same ministers and priests are supposed to receive their lessons from Jesus Christ who never entered a Seminary, nor even had a common school education. But we cannot expect anything else from such persons, when we take into consideration that the same feeling existed in the time of Jesus, by THE SAME CLASS TO- DAY. They say to-day and said then — , " Is not this the carpenter's Son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren James and Joses, and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?" The italics in the quotation are mine, so as to impress you very strongly that it is the opinion of the general public and those who deal with Religion as a vocation to-day, as in those days, that no person is capable of knowing anything concerning a Spiritual Life but the graduate of some Theological Seminary.

Jesus was no scholar, but the son of a tradesman, or a " carpenter ", and should not according to the priests : know " such things " concerning a Religious life to the extent of teaching it. He was considered by the " chief priests " and so-called learned men as " beside himself ", just as all men who advance a new idea.

Most all Scientific propositions were and are considered by the majority to be the result of " unsound " thinkers, or that they are not sane ideas. The chief priests remarked as much about Jesus when they said " he is beside himself ". The Darwin theory has been looked upon by many as an " insane idea ", because it was not up to the " be-

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PREFACE lief " of a Religious idea, but now we find many of these same persons who are as " insane " as Darwin, since they have changed their belief for things that have been proved to be so, although contrary to their Religion. So we can consider the following remark made by Herbert Spencer as worthy of mention here, as approved by one wishing to make known, ideas that are advanced.

" Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realize the fact that opinion is the agency thru which character adapts external arrangements to itself — that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency — is a unity of force, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost convictions: leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies thru whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief.

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" Doubtless whoever feels the greatness of the error to which his fellows cling, and the greatness of the truth which they reject, will find it hard to show due patience. It is hard to listen calmly to the futile arguments used in support of irrational doctrines, and to the misrepresentation of antagonistic doctrines. It is hard for him to bear the manifestation of that pride of ignorance which so far exceeds the pride of Science. Naturally enough such a one will be indignant when charged with irreligion because he declines to accept the carpenter-theory of creation as the most worthy one. He may think it needless as it is difficult, to concede his repugnance to a creed which tacitly ascribes to the Unknowable a love of adulation such as would be despised in a human being. Convinced as he is that all punishment, as we see it wrought out in the order of nature, is but a disguised beneficence, there will perhaps escape from him an angry condemnation of the belief that punishment is a divine vengence, and that divine vengence is eternal ".

The people believed the priests then and now because of their Seminary training — methodical teaching and believing, yet, Nicodemus could not understand how " man must be born again ". It is to point out herein that it is thru Thought that man is to be " born again ", and that Nicodemus looked to a Natural impossibility instead of a Mental possibility. A great deal of time has been spent in the past twenty-three years in preparing this work, not aiming as most writers who disagree with Darwin in some respects to associate a Religious belief of creation along with that of Natx PREFACE

ural development. Having compared what it says in the Bible with experience and observation, and do know by such that " the Christ ", as the Idea of Life Jesus taught is the Life to be here lived, although he too because of the early age in which he lived could not live the full meaning of the Truth. He at one time in particular was very desirous of living after the natural instead of the spiritual, but the Thought's will— " the Father's will " — of a Higher life appeared in the conscience soon after he said " let this cup pass from me ", and so the will was done as far as the life of Jesus was concerned and " will be done " regardless of how you and I in the natural sense may hope to live, since it is the work of God, or Thought, to develop this as an individual, instead of the then and now natural Idea of life. The conditions of life are continually changing, irrespective of what the individual has believed, and to believe in all what Jesus said as to what concerns a life hereafter, is as unreasonable as it was for Jesus and Paul to believe even in any part of the Old Testament. Paul said, " for their minds were blinded : for until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament, which veil is done away in Christ." The " Old " and " New " are but the history of the lives and experience of those who lived in those days — the experience and observation causing certain prophecies to be made, and since a lower intelligence only develops by comparison to a higher intelligence, we can readily understand why each following generation is partially due to the prophecy of the former generation. The view, that remarks made in the

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Bible are contradictory is a fact, but this is because of the selfish and non-selfish view of the authors, which was natural enough, because nature excelled then more than now, only that the Spiritual then predominated in Jesus in an unusual light more than in others.

Self, or selfishhness is derived from nature, and can only have its existence in the flesh, and because of nature being a part of our existence we naturally look towards a selfish view of life, or forward to a future or another life, and so the creeds as a religious body have failed to diagnose the Truth because of their own selfish view. A lie is the Truth until it is uncovered, and then another lie fills its place as the Truth, so goeth Religion. Religion is but a theory on Truth and called Scientific because of " things learnt ", and naturally so " believed ", instead of being believed thru experience and observation as Jesus alluded to when he said : " O ye hypocrites : Ye can discern the face of the sky : but can ye not discern the signs of the times?"

The Author.