They came for the specific purpose of making the evolution of the new humanity more rapid than otherwise it would be.

For, as you know, at that time humanity was facing a very terrible danger.

The bodies had evolved up to a certain point, the brooding Spirit was over each body, but the intellectual evolution had scarcely begun to dawn; mind, as we know it now, had scarcely asserted itself; only mind, as we see it in the animals, had been slowly unfolding its powers in the upward-climbing towards the light.

And as it is always true that any force which is poured down into a body must necessarily flow along the channels which that body has prepared for it, in these animal men, as we may call them, when they received a new influx of spiritual life--or, if we prefer the phrase, "as the influx grew stronger and stronger"-- that new life, that additional force, inevitably ran into animal channels, lacking the guiding and directing force of the intelligence.

Hence the immediate result of any increased down-pouring from the spiritual plane was an increase in animality in the growing man; and his body, growing up out of the animal kingdom, influenced by that--although, as you remember, human from the beginning, yet retracing its ancestry in those early days--was driven by the incoming life into various lines of activity, harmless to the brute, but that would have been destructive to the upward-climbing human being.