culine and most imperfectly religious. A religion
is partly explanation--a theory of life; it is partly emotion--an
attitude of mind, it is partly action--a system of morals. Man's special
effect on this large field of human development is clear. He pictured
his early gods as like to himself, and they behaved in accordance with
his ideals. In the dimmest, oldest religions, nearest the matriarchate,
we find great goddesses--types of Motherhood, Mother-love, Mother-care
and Service. But under masculine dominance, Isis and Ashteroth dwindle
away to an alluring Aphrodite--not Womanhood for the child and the
World--but the incarnation of female attractiveness for man.

As the idea of heaven developed in the man's mind it became the Happy
Hunting Ground of the savage, the beery and gory Valhalla of the
Norseman, the voluptuous, many-houri-ed Paradise of the Mohammedan.
These are men's heavens all. Women have never been so fond of hunting,
beer or blood; and their houris would be of the other kind. It may be
said that the early Christian idea of heaven is by no means planned for
men. That is trite, and is perhaps the reason why it has never had so
compelling an attraction for them.

Very early in his vague efforts towards religious expression, man voiced
his second strongest instinct--that of combat. His universe is always
dual, always a scene of combat. Born with that impulse, exercising it
continually, he naturally assumed it to be the major process in life.
It is not. Growth is the major process. Combat is a useful subsidiary
process, chiefly valuable for its initial use, to transmit the physical
superiority of the victor. Psychic and social advantages are not thus
secured or transmitted.

In no one particular is the androcentric character of our common thought
more clearly shown than in the general deification of what are now
described as "conflict stimuli." That which is true of the male creature
as such is assumed to be true of life in general; quite naturally, but
by no means correctly. To this universal masculine error we may trace in
the field of religion and ethics the great devil theory, which has for
so long obscured our minds. A God without an Adversary was inconceivable
to the masculine mind. From this basic misconception we find all our
ideas of ethics distorted; that which should have been treated as a
group of truths to be learned and habits to be cultivated was treated
in terms of combat, and moral growth m