“As I have pointed out to you, they are the laws that cultivated crocodiles so that at last they became men, that cultivated a hell of fire until it became a habitable world, and that will cultivate men until they become better than present-day men.
“The Reformer must study those laws. He must look at the world generously and widely, and from the very beginning of things. He must have communion with the great earth spirit which has brought all of us to where we are, and, humbling himself to the dust, study the working of that spirit through the ages.
“He will, unless he is blind, inevitably see one truth: that this great spirit has never meddled with the growth of life and thought, but has laboured Titanically to prepare the conditions favourable to that growth.
“It led life by the fin and claw till life developed hands and a mind wherewith to develop its own conditions favourable to growth. And all the improvements of the world since then have followed that law, the Law of Improvement of Conditions, not any vague Law for the Improvement of Life.
“When Life left the trees and found or dug caves to live in, it left behind it, as a record of its first shelter and home and improved condition, the first vague scratchings of Art. You may be sure that could it have found a record we would discover also in those caves some sign of the first glimmer of Love.
“The cave was the first home of the germ of civilisation, and the man who built the first hut laid the foundations of all the palaces and cathedrals of earth.
“The man who improved the condition of the first square yard of land laid the foundation of all worldly prosperity, and the man who made the first hinge of hide for the first door destroyed a barricade and laid down the first condition for hospitality.
“Whenever man has fallen away from the teaching of this law, he has always fallen.
Athens, Egypt, Rome
“Athens rose to the heights of the Acropolis, but she failed in the furtherance of those conditions necessary for the development of the world—witness her streets. Rome rose to splendour and fell in ruins simply because of her failure in the development of material conditions to feed and foster Progress—witness her roads—made for armies to march on. Egypt destroyed herself with dreams of mysticism and power useless to the development of life—witness the Pyramids and the Sphinx.