By means of this process of revelation, within the human family as well as elsewhere in nature, we shall have the development of the power of thought. This will come about through the development of the faculty of discrimination, which will offer choices to man, and thus develop a truer sense of values. False and true standards will emerge in man's consciousness, and those choices will be made which will lay the foundation of the new order, which will inaugurate the new race, with its new laws and novel approaches, and so usher in the new religion of love and brotherhood, and that period wherein the group and the group-good will be the dominant note. Then separateness and hatreds will fade out and men will be merged in a true unity.

The third factor under consideration, the coming of the Christ as it is called, must also be noted. Everywhere we find the spirit of expectancy, and the demand for a manifestation and a symbolic happening which we call by various names but which is usually referred to as the advent of Christ. This, as you know, may be an actual physical coming, as before in Palestine, or it may connote a definite over-shadowing of His disciples and lovers by the Great Lord of Life. This over-shadowing will call forth a response from all those who are in any way spiritually awakened. Or again, the coming may take the form of a tremendous inflow of the Christ principle, the Christ life and love, working out through the human family. Perhaps all three possibilities may be found simultaneously on our planet very shortly. It is [282] not for us to say. It is for us to be ready, and for us to work at preparing the world for that significant series of events. The immediate future will show. The point I seek to make, however, is that this inflow of the Christ spirit of love (whether it comes through a Person in bodily form or through His felt and realized Presence) will again be twofold in its effect.

This is a hard saying for the unthinking and the illogical. Both the good and the evil man will be stimulated; both material desire and spiritual aspiration will be awakened and fostered. Facts prove the truth of the saying that a heavily fertilized garden and a carefully tended and watered plot of ground will produce its crop of weeds as well as flowers. Yet in this fact you have two reactions to the same sun, the same water, the same fertilizing agency and the same care. The difference exists in the seeds found in the ground upon which these factors play. The inflow of love therefore will stimulate earthly love and earthly desire and animal lust; it will foster the urge to possess in the material sense, with all the evil consequent upon this attitude, and the resulting growth of sexual reactions, and the many expressions of an ill-regulated mechanism, responding to an impersonal force. But it will also produce the growth of brotherly love and foster the development and the expression of group consciousness, of universal understanding; it will produce a new and powerful tendency to fusion, to at-one-ment and to synthesis. All this will be brought about through the medium of humanity and the Christ spirit. Steadily the love of Christ will be shed abroad in the earth, and its influence will grow stronger during the coming centuries, until at the end of the Aquarian age, and through the work of the seventh ray (bringing the pairs of opposites into closer cooperation), we can look for the "raising of Lazarus from the dead," and the [283] emergence of humanity out of the tomb of matter. The hidden divinity will be revealed. Steadily all forms will be brought under the influence of the Christ spirit, and the consummation of love will be brought about.

The question at issue is not primarily a religious one, except in so far as social relations are basically divine relations. It is fundamental in its connotation, and when it is solved we shall see the establishment of equality between the sexes, the [284] removal of those barriers which at present exist between men and women, and the safeguarding of the family unit. This will involve therefore the protection of the child, so that he may be given those essentials to right physical growth and that true education which will lead to emotional unfoldment along sound lines, and a mental development which will enable him to serve his race, his time and his group to the best possible advantage. This has always been an ideal, but it has never yet been satisfactorily accomplished. The solving of the sexual problem will release the minds of men from an inhibition and an undue concern, and so produce a mental freedom which will admit of the inflow of new ideas and concepts. We shall discover that vice and virtue have no real reference to ability and inability to conform to man-made laws, but to man's attitude to himself and to his social relation with God and his fellowmen. Virtue is the manifestation in man of the spirit of cooperation with his brothers, necessitating unselfishness, understanding and complete self-forgetfulness. Vice is the negation of this attitude. These two words signify in reality simply perfection and imperfection, conformity to a divine standard of brotherhood or a failure to achieve that standard. Standards are shifting things and change with man's growth towards divinity. They vary also according to man's destiny as it is affected by his time and age, his nature and surroundings. They alter also according to the point of evolutionary development. The standard for attainment is not today what it was one thousand years ago, nor a thousand years hence will it be what it is today.