The Women of Mormondom

by Edward W. Tullidge

But the sublime and most primitive conception of Mormonism is, that man in his essential being is divine, that he is the offspring of God—that God is indeed his Father.

And woman? for she is the theme now.

Woman is heiress of the Gods. She is joint heir with her elder brother, Jesus the Christ; but she inherits from her God-Father and her God-Mother. Jesus is the "beloved" of that Father and Mother—their well-tried Son, chosen to work out the salvation and exaltation of the whole human family.

And shall it not be said then that the subject rises from the God-Father to the God-Mother? Surely it is a rising in the sense of the culmination of the divine idea. The God-Father is not robbed of his everlasting glory by this maternal completion of himself. It is an expansion both of deity and humanity.

They twain are one God!

The supreme Unitarian conception is here; the God-Father and the God-Mother! The grand unity of God is in them—in the divine Fatherhood and the divine Motherhood—the very beginning and consummation of creation. Not in the God-Father and the God-Son can the unity of the heavens and the earths be worked out; neither with any logic of facts nor of idealities. In them the Masonic trinities; in the everlasting Fathers and the everlasting Mothers the unities of creations.

Our Mother in heaven is decidedly a new revelation, as beautiful and delicate to the masculine sense of the race as it is just and exalting to the feminine. It is the woman's own revelation. Not even did Jesus proclaim to the world the revelation of our Mother in heaven—co-existent and co-equal with the eternal Father. This was left, among the unrevealed truths, to the present age, when it would seem the woman is destined by Providence to become very much the oracle of a new and peculiar civilization.

The oracle of this last grand truth of woman's divinity and of her eternal Mother as the partner with the Father in the creation of worlds, is none other than the Mormon Church. It was revealed in the glorious theology of Joseph, and established by Brigham in the vast patriarchal system which he has made firm as the foundations of the earth, by proclaiming Adam as our Father and God. The Father is first in name and order, but the Mother is with him—these twain, one from the beginning.

Then came our Hebraic poetess with her hymn of invocation, and woman herself brought the perfected idea of deity into the forms of praise and worship. Is not this exalting woman to her sphere beyond all precedent?

Let it be marked that the Roman Catholic idea of the Mother of God is wonderfully lower than the Mormon idea. The Church of Rome only brings the maternal conception, linked with deity, in Christ, and that too in quite the inferior sense. It is not primitive—it is the exception; it begins and ends with the Virgin Mary. A question indeed whether it elevates womanhood and motherhood. The ordinary idea is rather the more exalted; for that always, in a sense, makes the mother superior to the son. The proverb that great mothers conceive great sons has really more poetry in it than the Roman Catholic doctrine that Mary was the Mother of God.