This is the secret of life, that we live not for ourselves but for others. If mankind were one great immortal being, how monotonous life would be; how egotistical would all our aspirations become! But nature renders all egotism futile. None of us finds an abiding home here on earth; we pass away and new generations fill the places we leave vacant.
Daily the world grows older, and yet it remains ever young. There is the same happiness, the same bliss and joy that ever thrilled the heart of a mother. Christianity has abolished Venus, the great mother goddess, but Eve has taken her place; and if Eve too is to be deposed, mankind will still cling to the old idea of eternal womanhood, the patron of love and loveliness, of wifehood and of motherhood.
APHRODITE IN ART.
BABYLONIAN CLAY FIGURES.
THE oldest assured statues of Venus, of an all-nourishing mother goddess, are perhaps the little figurines frequently found in Mesopotamia representing “the Lady” or Beltis (the feminine of Bel, “the Lord”) in the shape of a naked woman, sometimes with a child in her arms; but we may fairly well assume that even the artists of the stone age took up this all-absorbing subject, and if this be the case we may be justified in calling the torso of a naked female figure discovered in Brassempouy, a Venus,—so far the oldest Venus that has come down to us.
THE VENUS OF BRASSEMPOUY.
