a hermaphrodite god, when once sex is
associated with deity.

Of all founders of religions, Mohammed first proclaimed a divinity
without relation to sex. One of his earliest suras reads:

"He is God alone,
God the eternal.
He begetteth not, and is not begotten;
And there is none like unto him."

And elsewhere:--

"He hath no spouse, neither hath he any offspring."[71-1]

While he expressly acknowledged the divine conception of Jesus, he
denied the coarse and literal version of that doctrine in vogue among
the ignorant Christians around him. Enlightened christendom, to-day,
does not, I believe, differ from him on this point.

Such sexual religions do not arise, as the theory has hitherto been,
from study and observation of the generative agencies in nature, but
from the identity of object between love in sense and love in intellect,
profane and sacred passion. The essence of each is _continuance_,
preservation; the origin of each is subjective, personal; but the former
has its root in sensation, the latter in reason.

The sex-difference in organisms, the "abhorrence of self-fertilization"
which Mr. Darwin speaks of as so conspicuous and inexplicable a
phenomenon, is but one example of the sway of a law which as action and
reaction, thesis and antithesis, is common to both elementary motion and
thought. The fertile and profound fancy of Greece delighted to prefigure
this truth in significant symbols and myths. Love, Eros, is shown
carrying the globe, or wielding the club of Hercules; he is the unknown
spouse of Psyche, the soul; and from the primitive chaos he brings forth
the ordered world, the Kosmos.

The intimate and strange relation between sensuality and religion, so
often commented upon and denied, again proven, and always
misinterpreted, thus receives a satisfactory explanation. Some singular
manifestations of it, of significance in religious history, are
presented by the records of insane delusions. They confirm what I have
above urged, that the association is not one derived from observation
through intellectual processes, but is a consequence of physiological
connections, of identity of aim in the distinct realms of thought and
emotion.

That eminent writer on mental diseases, Schroeder van der Kolk, when
speaking of the forms of melancholy which arise from physical
conditions, remarks: "The patient who is melancholy from disorders of
the generative organs considers himself sinf