“I did not know this?”
“Oh, these modern perverters disguise their horrible tenets with many refined phrases; yet He that overwhelmed gross Sodom and the jewelless, naked dancers about the golden bull, sees through all their thin drapings and will judge the free lover, corrupt socialist and libertine as He did those ancients. The Assyrian and Egyptian representations of Venus generally appeared holding a serpent; a sort of bitter admission of the curse in the hand of perverted love and the fierce lashings that follow it.”
“I fail to connect the ancient with the present heresies, my good teacher.”
“I pause to-day here, reminded of their common origin and consequences. God put it into the hearts of His creatures to love women, honor motherhood, and worship Him. Read Sinai’s law, and this is all manifest. There came a perversion; the love of woman was degraded, motherhood was denied its honor, and men became God-defying. There was a confusion worse than that of Babel, and the worshiping was transferred, first, to symbolized lust; then degraded. They that adored Venus, knowing how her adoration had depraved themselves, came to believe that she scandalized the heaven they imagined. Then came a time when her earthly rites even scandalized the wiser pagans.”
“My husband leads me along strange ways. Is it wise to do so?”
“I see a grand end; follow me. There is a deep significance in the fact that among the pagans there constantly appeared this adoration of woman on account of her power of motherhood. I take this adoration as proof of a conscious need feeling after a vaguely discerned truth. The yearning is suggested by the paired gods. Assyria had its Beltis, consort of Bel-nimrud; and there were Allelta of the Arabians, the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians, the Aphrodite of the Greeks, Ceres and Venus of Rome, this Astarte of the Giants; beyond all, in utter odiousness Khem, the Phallic god of Egypt. Amid all these false ideals, the divine home with its pure love and our immortality by grace’s mystery, were overslaughed in human thought. The glaring passions, that were unwilling to believe in other immortality than that that comes through posterity, other heaven than that of sensuous pleasure, fascinated and dominated hearts and souls.”
“And worshiping women-gods did this.”
“Worshiping beings with the form of women did it! Reverence for true womanhood ever exalts and never degrades. But these ancients adored very gorgons with snakes for hair, and having tearing, brazen claws. They set these gorgons with the Harpies, in their mythologies, at the gates of dark Pluto’s palace. Alas, where men are led by ill-flavored women, is ever more Pluto’s gateway.”
“The up-digging of these ancient soils, knight, give forth foul odors. Did they not dread a just and jealous God?”