Chapter 5 - The Mission of Jesus - p.99

Natural Selection

Hitherto, our interpretation of the Bible has worked along the lines of great Universal Laws naturally inherent in the constitution of Man and thus applicable to all men alike; but now we must turn to that other line of an Exclusive Selection to which I referred in the opening chapter. This is not an arbitrary selection --- for that would contradict the very conception of the unchangeable Universal Law on which the whole Bible is founded --- but it is a process of "natural selection" arising out of the Law itself and results not from any change in the Law but from the attainment of an exalted realisation of what the Law really is. The first suggestion of this process of separation is contained in the promise that the deliverance of the race should come through "the Seed of the Woman", for in contradistinction to this "Seed" there is the seed of the Serpent; "I will put enmity between thy seed and her seed". Again we see the process of selection coming out in the preference given to the offering of Abel over that of Cain, and again the