eveal the fact
that in early ages of human society the physiological question of sex
was a theme of the utmost importance, while various proofs are at hand
showing that throughout the past the question of the relative importance
of the female and male elements in procreation has been a fruitful
source of religious contention and strife. These struggles, which from
time to time involved the entire habitable globe, were of long duration,
subsiding only after the adherents of the one sex or the other had
gained sufficient ascendancy over the opposite party to successfully
erect its altars and compel the worship of its own peculiar gods, which
worship usually included a large share of the temporal power. Only since
the male sex has gained sufficient influence to control not only human
action, but human thought as well, have these contentions subsided.(48)

48) At the present time, through causes which are not difficult to
understand, the question of the relative importance of the two sexes is
again assuming a degree of importance indicative of the changes which
are taking place in human thought, and for the reason that we are just
witnessing the dawn of an intellectual age, the problems to be solved
will admit of no answers other than those based upon a scientific
foundation.

That religious wars have not been confined to more modern times, and
that among an early race the attempt to exalt the male principle met
with obstinate resistance which involved mankind in a conflict,
the violence of which has never been exceeded, are facts which seem
altogether probable. Indeed, there is much evidence going to show
that the cause of the original dispersion of a primitive race was the
contention which arose respecting their religious faith or regarding the
physiological question of the relative importance of the sexes in the
function of reproduction; and that the general war indicated in the
Puranas, which began in India and extended over the entire habitable
globe, and which was celebrated by the poets as "the basis of Grecian
mythology," originated in this conflict over the precedence of one or
the other of the sex-principles contained in the Deity. Although there
are no records of these wars in extant history, accounts of them are
still preserved in the traditions and religious monuments of oriental
countries. In Egypt, in India, and to a greater or less extent in other
Eastern countries, these physiological contests hav