Far from these texts

These conquerors of Mesopotamia carried in their ranks many of the better Andite strains of the mixed northern races of Turkestan, including some of the Adamson stock. These less advanced but more vigorous tribes from the north quickly and willingly assimilated the residue of the civilization of Mesopotamia and presently developed into those mixed peoples found in the Euphrates valley at the beginning of historic annals. They quickly revived many phases of the passing civilization of Mesopotamia, adopting the arts of the valley tribes and much of the culture of the Sumerians. They even sought to build a third tower of Babel and later adopted the term as their national name.

The school government is a replica of the national government with its three correlated branches, the teaching staff functioning as the third or advisory legislative division. The chief object of education on this continent is to make every pupil a self-supporting citizen.

These Andonic tribes were the early river dwellers of France; they lived along the river Somme for tens of thousands of years. The Somme is the one river unchanged by the glaciers, running down to the sea in those days much as it does today. And that explains why so much evidence of the Andonic descendants is found along the course of this river valley.

In general, therefore, as the human remains of the last twenty thousand years are unearthed, it will be impossible clearly to distinguish the five original types. Study of such skeletal structures will disclose that mankind is now divided into approximately three classes:

The bird life of the planet continued to develop, but with few important evolutionary changes. The majority of modern birds were existent, including gulls, herons, flamingoes, buzzards, falcons, eagles, owls, quails, and ostriches.

Race mixture is always advantageous in that it favors versatility of culture and makes for a progressive civilization, but if the inferior elements of racial stocks predominate, such achievements will be short-lived. A polyglot culture can be preserved only if the superior stocks reproduce themselves in a safe margin over the inferior. Unrestrained multiplication of inferiors, with decreasing reproduction of superiors, is unfailingly suicidal of cultural civilization.

And it was in consequence of having been thrown so completely on their own resources that Machiventa Melchizedek, one of the twelve planetary receivers, volunteered to do that which had been done only six times in all the history of Nebadon: to personalize on earth as a temporary man of the realm, to bestow himself as an emergency Son of world ministry. Permission was granted for this adventure by the Salvington authorities, and the actual incarnation of Machiventa Melchizedek was consummated near what was to become the city of Salem, in Palestine. The entire transaction of the materialization of this Melchizedek Son was completed by the planetary receivers with the co-operation of the Life Carriers, certain of the Master Physical Controllers, and other celestial personalities resident on Urantia.

These one hundred rematerialized members of the Prince’s staff were chosen by Caligastia from over 785,000 ascendant citizens of Jerusem who volunteered for embarkation on the Urantia adventure. Each one of the chosen one hundred was from a different planet, and none of them were from Urantia.

On a normal planet the arrival of the Material Son would ordinarily herald the approach of a great age of invention, material progress, and intellectual enlightenment. The post-Adamic era is the great scientific age of most worlds, but not so on Urantia. Though the planet was peopled by races physically fit, the tribes languished in the depths of savagery and moral stagnation.

The 1,111 loyal secondary midwayers are engaged in important missions on earth. As compared with their primary associates, they are decidedly material. They exist just outside the range of mortal vision and possess sufficient latitude of adaptation to make, at will, physical contact with what humans call “material things.” These unique creatures have certain definite powers over the things of time and space, not excepting the beasts of the realm.

The purer strains of the violet race had retained the Adamic tradition of peace-seeking, which explains why the earlier race movements had been more in the nature of peaceful migrations. But as the Adamites united with the Nodite stocks, who were by this time a belligerent race, their Andite descendants became, for their day and age, the most skillful and sagacious militarists ever to live on Urantia. Thenceforth the movements of the Mesopotamians grew increasingly military in character and became more akin to actual conquests.

While the midwayers were brought into existence fully developed — experiencing no period of growth or development from immaturity — they never cease to grow in wisdom and experience. Like mortals they are evolutionary creatures, and they have a culture which is a bona fide evolutionary attainment. There are many great minds and mighty spirits among the Urantia midway corps.

When these barbarian cavalrymen from the northeast overran the whole Euphrates valley, they did not conquer the remnants of the Andites who dwelt about the mouth of the river on the Persian Gulf. These Sumerians were able to defend themselves because of superior intelligence, better weapons, and their extensive system of military canals, which were an adjunct to their irrigation scheme of interconnecting pools. They were a united people because they had a uniform group religion. They were thus able to maintain their racial and national integrity long after their neighbors to the northwest were broken up into isolated city-states. No one of these city groups was able to overcome the united Sumerians.

2. Era of the Melchizedek missionaries. Urantia religion was in no small measure regenerated by the efforts of those teachers who were commissioned by Machiventa Melchizedek when he lived and taught at Salem almost two thousand years before Christ. These missionaries proclaimed faith as the price of favor with God, and their teachings, though unproductive of any immediately appearing religions, nevertheless formed the foundations on which later teachers of truth were to build the religions of Urantia.

Primitive man made his evolutionary appearance on earth a little less than one million years ago, and he had a vigorous experience. He instinctively sought to escape the danger of mingling with the inferior simian tribes. But he could not migrate eastward because of the arid Tibetan land elevations, 30,000 feet above sea level; neither could he go south nor west because of the expanded Mediterranean Sea, which then extended eastward to the Indian Ocean; and as he went north, he encountered the advancing ice. But even when further migration was blocked by the ice, and though the dispersing tribes became increasingly hostile, the more intelligent groups never entertained the idea of going southward to live among their hairy tree-dwelling cousins of inferior intellect.

This Jerusem pair left behind them on the capital of Satania and elsewhere, one hundred offspring — fifty sons and fifty daughters — magnificent creatures who had escaped the pitfalls of progression, and who were all in commission as faithful stewards of universe trust at the time of their parents’ departure for Urantia. And they were all present in the beautiful temple of the Material Sons attendant upon the farewell exercises associated with the last ceremonies of the bestowal acceptance. These children accompanied their parents to the dematerialization headquarters of their order and were the last to bid them farewell and divine speed as they fell asleep in the personality lapse of consciousness which precedes the preparation for seraphic transport. The children spent some time together at the family rendezvous rejoicing that their parents were soon to become the visible heads, in reality the sole rulers, of planet 606 in the system of Satania.

On an average evolutionary planet the six evolutionary races of color appear one by one; the red man is the first to evolve, and for ages he roams the world before the succeeding colored races make their appearance. The simultaneous emergence of all six races on Urantia, and in one family, was most unusual.

From their highland headquarters and from sixty-one far-scattered settlements, Van and Amadon recruited a corps of over three thousand willing and enthusiastic workers who, in solemn assembly, dedicated themselves to this mission of preparing for the promised — at least expected — Son.

Jehovah is a term which in recent times has been employed to designate the completed concept of Yahweh which finally evolved in the long Hebrew experience. But the name Jehovah did not come into use until fifteen hundred years after the times of Jesus.

This short-ray energy charge of universe space is four hundred times greater than all other forms of radiant energy existing in the organized space domains. The output of short space rays, whether coming from the blazing nebulae, tense electric fields, outer space, or the vast hydrogen dust clouds, is modified qualitatively and quantitatively by fluctuations of, and sudden tension changes in, temperature, gravity, and electronic pressures.