safe to liberate such ethical and intelligent mortals. Such refined peoples well know how to utilize leisure for self-improvement and planetary advancement. This age witnesses the further purification of the racial stocks by the restriction of reproduction among the less fit and poorly endowed individuals.
The political government and social administration of the races continue to improve, self-government being fairly well established by the end of this age. By self-government we refer to the highest type of representative government. Such worlds advance and honor only those leaders and rulers who are most fit to bear social and political responsibilities.
During this epoch the majority of the world mortals are Adjuster indwelt. But even yet the bestowal of divine Monitors is not always universal. The Adjusters of fusion destiny are not yet bestowed upon all planetary mortals; it is still necessary for the will creatures to choose the Mystery Monitors.
During the closing ages of this dispensation, society begins to return to more simplified forms of living. The complex nature of an advancing civilization is running its course, and mortals are learning to live more naturally and effectively. And this trend increases with each succeeding epoch. This is the age of the flowering of art, music, and higher learning. The physical sciences have already reached their height of development. The termination of this age, on an ideal world, witnesses the fullness of a great religious awakening, a world-wide spiritual enlightenment. And this extensive arousal of the spiritual natures of the races is the signal for the arrival of the bestowal Son and for the inauguration of the fifth mortal epoch.
On many worlds it develops that the planet is not made ready for a bestowal Son by one magisterial mission; in that event there will be a second, even a succession of Magisterial Sons, each of whom will advance the races from one dispensation to another until the planet is made ready for the gift of the bestowal Son. On the second and subsequent missions the Magisterial Sons may or may not be incarnated. But no matter how many Magisterial Sons may appear—and they may also come as such after the bestowal Son—the advent of each one marks the end of one dispensation and the beginning of another.
These dispensations of the Magisterial Sons cover anywhere from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand years of Urantia time. Sometimes such an epoch is much shorter and in rare instances even longer. But in the fullness of time one of these same Magisterial Sons will be born as the Paradise bestowal Son.
When a certain standard of intellectual and spiritual development is attained on an inhabited world, a Paradise bestowal Son always arrives. On normal worlds he does not appear in the flesh until the races have ascended to the highest levels of intellectual development and ethical attainment. But on Urantia the bestowal Son, even your own Creator Son, appeared at the close of the Adamic dispensation, but that is not the usual order of events on the worlds of space.
When the worlds have become ripe for spiritualization, the bestowal Son arrives. These Sons always belong to the Magisterial or Avonal order except in that case, once in each local universe, when the Creator Son prepares for his terminal bestowal on some evolutionary world, as occurred when Michael of
