erior to Chaldaean aberrations, Brahmanism deformed
into rites that sanctified vice and did so, on a theory common to many
faiths, that the gods demand the surrender of whatever is most dear, if it
be love that must be sacrificed, if it be decency that must be renounced.
The latter refinement which Chaldaea invented, and India retained, Judaea
reviled.

II

THE CURTAINS OF SOLOMON

In the deluge women must have been swept wholly away. If not, then they
became beings to whom genealogy was indifferent. The long list of Noah's
descendants, which Genesis provides, contains no mention of them. When
ultimately they reappear, their consistency is that of silhouettes. It is
as though they belonged to an inferior order. Historically they did.

Woman was not honored in Judaea. The patriarch was chieftain and priest.
His tent was visited by angels, occasionally by creatures less beatific.
In spite of the terrible pomps that surrounded the advent of the
decalogue, there subsisted for his eternal temptation the furnace of
Moloch and Baal's orgiastic nights. These things--in themselves
corruptions of Chaldaean ceremonies--woman personified. Woman incarnated
sin. It was she who had invented it. To Ecclesiasticus, the evil of man
excelled her virtue. To Moses, she was dangerously impure. In Leviticus,
her very birth was a shame. To Solomon, she was more bitter than death. As
a consequence, the attitude of woman generally was as elegiac as that of
Jephthah's daughter. When she appeared it was but to vanish. In betrothals
there was but a bridegroom that asked and a father that gave. The bride
was absent or silent. As a consequence, also, the heroine was rare. Of the
great nations of antiquity, Israel produced fewer notable women than any
other. Yet, that, it may be, was by way of precaution, in order to reserve
the strength of a people for the presentation of one who, transcending
all, was to reign in heaven to the genuflections of the earth.

Meanwhile, conjointly with Baal and Moloch, Ishtar--known locally as
Ashtaroth--circumadjacently ruled. At a period when these abstractions
were omnipresent, when their temples were thronged, when their empires
seemed built for all time, the Hebrew prophets, who continuously reviled
them, foretold that they would pass and with them the gods, dogmas, states
that they sustained. So promptly were the prophecies fulfilled that they
must have sounded like the heraldings of the judgment of Go