here, too, there were nunneries filled with
spouses of God. I connect it with the general doctrine that chastity in
either sex is more agreeable to God than marriage, and this belief, I
think, very commonly arises at a certain stage of development of the
religious sentiment, when it unconsciously recognises the indisputable
fact that sex-love, whether in its form of love of woman, family, or
nation, is not what that sentiment craves. This is first shown by
rejecting the idea of sex-love in the birth of the god; then his priests
and priestesses refuse its allurements, and deny all its claims, those
of kindred, of country, of race, until the act of generation itself is
held unholy and the thought of sex a sin. By such forcible though rude
displays do they set forth their unconscious acknowledgment of that
eternal truth: "He that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not
worthy of Me."

The significance of these words is not that there is an antagonism in
the forms of love. It is not that man should hate himself, as Pascal,
following the teachings of the Church, so ably argued; nor that the one
sex should be set over against the other in sterile abhorrence; nor yet
that love of country and of kindred is incompatible with that toward the
Supreme of thought; but it is that each of these lower, shallower,
evanescent forms of emotion is and must be lost in, subordinated to,
that highest form to which these words have reference. Reconciliation,
not abnegation, is what they mean.

Even those religions which teach in its strictness the oneness of God
have rarely separated from his personality the attribute of sex. He is
the father, _pater et genitor_, of all beings. The monotheism which we
find in Greece and India generally took this form. The ancient Hebrews
emphasized the former, not the latter sense of the word, and thus
depriving it of its more distinctive characteristics of sex, prepared
the way for the teachings of Christianity, in which the Supreme Being
always appears with the attributes of the male, but disconnected from
the idea of generation.

Singularly enough, the efforts to which this latent incongruity prompts,
even in persons speaking English, in which tongue the articles and
adjectives have no genders, point back to the errors of an earlier age.
A recent prayer by an eminent spiritualist commences:--"Oh Eternal
Spirit, our Father and our Mother!" The expression illustrates how
naturally arises the belief in