moral, be reached until the characteristics of sex
are lost in the concept of the purely human. In the noblest men of
history there has often been noted something feminine, a gentleness
which is not akin to weakness; and the women whose names are ornaments
to nations have displayed a calm greatness, not unwomanly but something
more than belongs to woman. Art acknowledges this. In the Vatican Apollo
we see masculine strength united with maidenly softness; and in the
traditional face and figure of Christ a still more striking example how
the devout mind conjoins the traits of both sexes to express the highest
possibility of the species. "Soaring above the struggle in which the
real is involved with its limitations, and free from the characteristics
of gender, the ideal of beauty as well as the ideal of humanity, alike
maintain a perfect sexual equilibrium."[67-1]

Another and more familiar expression of the religious emotion, akin to
the belief in double-sexed deities,--nay, in its physiological aspect
identical with it, as assuming sexual self-sufficiency, is the myth of
the Virgin-Mother.

When Columbus first planted the cross on the shores of San Domingo, the
lay brother Roman Pane, whom he sent forth to convert the natives of
that island, found among them a story of a virgin Mamona, whose son
Yocauna, a hero and a god, was chief among divinities, and had in the
old times taught this simple people the arts of peace and guided them
through the islands.[68-1] When the missionaries penetrated to the
Iroquois, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and many other tribes, this same story
was told them with such startling likeness to one they came to tell,
that they felt certain either St. Thomas or Satan had got the start of
them in America.

But had these pious men known as well as we do the gentile religions of
the Old World, they would have seasoned their admiration. Long before
Christianity was thought of, the myth of the Virgin-Mother of God was in
the faith of millions, as we have had abundantly shown us of late years
by certain expounders of Christian dogmas.

How is this strange, impossible belief to be explained? Of what secret,
unconscious, psychological working was it the expression? Look at its
result. It is that wherever this doctrine is developed the _status
matrimonialis_ is held to be less pure, less truly religious, than the
_status virginitatis_. Such is the teaching to-day in Lhassa, in Rome;
so it was in Yucatan, w