But it will be strange news to many that years before Theodore Parker breathed that theme in public prayer, the Mormon people sang their hymn of invocation to the Father and Mother in heaven, given them by the Hebraic pen of Eliza R. Snow.
And in this connection it will be proper to relate the fact that a Mormon woman once lived as a servant in the house of Theodore Parker. With a disciple's pardonable cunning she was in the habit of leaving Mormon books in the way of her master. It is not unlikely that the great transcendentalist had read the Mormon poetess' hymn to "Our Father-and-Mother God!"
And perhaps it will appear still more strange to the reader, who may have been told that woman in the Mormon scheme ranked low—almost to the barbarian scale—to learn that the revelation of the Father and Mother of creation, given through the Mormon prophet, and set to song by a kindred spirit, is the basic idea of the whole Mormon theology.
The hymn of invocation not only treats our God parents in this grand primeval sense, but the poetess weaves around their parental centre the divine drama of the pre-existence of worlds.
This celestial theme was early revealed to the church by the prophet, and for now nearly forty years the hymn of invocation has been familiar in the meetings of the saints.
A marvel indeed is this, that at the time modern Christians, and even "philosophers," were treating this little earth, with its six thousand years of mortal history, as the sum of the intelligent universe—to which was added this life's sequel, with the gloom of hell prevailing—the Mormon people, in their very household talk, conversed and sang of an endless succession of worlds.
They talked of their own pre-existing lives. They came into the divine action ages ago, played their parts in a primeval state, and played them well. Hence were they the first fruits of the gospel. They scarcely limited their pre-existing lives to a beginning, or compassed their events, recorded in other worlds, in a finite story. Down through the cycles of all eternity they had come, and they were now entabernacled spirits passing through a mortal probation.
It was of such a theme that "Sister Eliza" sang; and with such a theme her hymn of invocation to our Father and Mother in heaven soon made the saints familiar in every land.
Let us somewhat further expound the theme of this hymn, which our poetess could not fully embody in the simple form of verse.
God the Father and God the Mother stand, in the grand pre-existing view, as the origin and centre of the spirits of all the generations of mortals who had been entabernacled on this earth.