For Revelation has enriched our education. Through much misconstruction and misconception the vision of Creation has been coloured by the prejudice of men.
God made man in His own image, male and female; man has made him altogether male. The Creator said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” His creature asserts, “It is best for us to be alone.” But it never has been good; it is not good now. Only in following out the lines of God’s conception can man (homo) remain in the image of God. Early names were all connotative, recording some special quality or association, and the early name of Adam was “Dust,” and the meaning of Eve is “Life.” The Titanic and Earth-born Physical force of which Adam was made the representative, must be united to that which lives and brings Life, to make one perfect being. Only through the spiritual and practical union of Man with Woman can society be regenerated. When Woman ate of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, she learned more clearly to distinguish the good from the evil and to choose that good. Therefore, God chose the Woman as His fellow-worker in the scheme of Redemption. As part of the curse of Satan it is part of the primeval blessing of Humanity, that “I will put enmity between thee and the Woman.” The hands that restrict the Woman’s power, and limit her opportunity of fulfilling her mission, are fighting against God’s Will.
The words of God, “Thy desire shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,” is a prophecy of man’s wrong and not a statute of man’s right. To understand this we have only to collate the passage with that other in which God speaks to Cain before he slew his brother—“If thou doest well shalt thou not be accepted, and if thou doest not well sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”
The result of the first “physical force argument” was the death of the “righteous Abel.” The result of the same argument, through centuries of human existence, has been the death-in-life of the Woman whom God opposed to Satan. And the paralysis of the half has affected the whole body Social and Politic.
The Divine and Human are united through the Woman.
It is only by the representative Woman that Christ becomes the “Son of Man.” [i]
Christ, as His Father did, took women to be His friends and fellow-workers. Women never forsook Him. Woman watched by His cradle and spread the “glad tidings” ere yet He had opened His lips. Fearless women stood by His Cross and saw the last of His life; faithful women went to the Tomb and learned first of His Resurrection.
Through the ages, the contest between Satan and the Woman and between the Seed of Satan and the Seed of the Woman, has been made unduly hard both for Man and Woman, because of the Woman being bound both hand and foot. “The Dragon was wroth with the Woman and went to make war with the Remnant of her Seed which keep the Commandments of God, and have the Testimony of Jesus Christ” (Rev. xii. 17).
Let her have Freedom and Fair Play. Let her show what, God helping her, she can do, when men cease hindering her in the development of Herself. They also will be gainers thereby. It will seem a new Creation when the earlier-born Freeman meets the later-born Freewoman and recognises at last that it was not good for him to have been so long alone. For any Moral Regeneration, or for any Political Stability, men must learn to distinguish Good from Evil, Justice from short-sighted Selfishness, and to see, in the recognition of Woman as a help-meet for them in all things, the fulfilment of God’s Will in regard to both.
The Truth shall make you Free!