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 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.