by a dove, or the moon floating on the water.  They are “the mother,” “mamma,” “emma,” “ummah,” or “the woman.”  The symbols are everywhere the same, though given with different names.  Everywhere it is Mary, the mother; the female principle in nature, adored side by side with the male.  She shares in the work of creation and salvation, and has a kind of equality with the Father of all; hence we hear of the immaculate conception.  She produces a child alone in some stories, without even divine co-operation.  The Virgo of the Zodiac is represented in ancient sculptures and drawings as a woman suckling a child, and the Paamylian feasts were celebrated at the spring equinox, and were the equivalent of the Christian feast of the Annunciation, when the power of the highest overshadowed Mary of Nazareth.  Thus in India, we have Devaki and Krishna; in Egypt, Osiris and Horus—­the “Saviour of the World;” in Christendom, Mary and Christ; the pictures and carvings of India and Egypt would be indistinguishable from those of Europe, were it not for the differences of dress.  Apis, the sacred Egyptian bull, was always born without an earthly father, and his mother never had a second calf.  So the later Sun-god, Jesus, is born without sexual intercourse, and Mary never bears another child.  Jupiter visits Leda as a swan; God visits Mary as an overshadowing dove.  The salutation of Gabriel to Mary is curiously like that of Mercury to Electra:  “Hail, most happy of all women, you whom Jupiter has honoured with his couch; your blood will give laws to the world, I am the messenger of the gods.”  The mother of Fohi, the great Chinese God, became enceinte by walking in the footsteps of a giant.  The mother of Hercules did not lose her virginity.  The savages of St. Domingo represented the chief divinity by a female figure called the “mother of God.”  On Friday, the day of Freya, or Venus, many Christians still eat only fish, fish being sacred to the female deity.

In Comtism we find the latest development of woman-worship, wherein the “emotional sex” becomes the sacred sex, to be guarded, cherished, sustained, adored; and thus in the youngest religion the stamp of the eldest is found.

Thus womanhood has been worshipped in all ages of the world, and maternity has been deified by all creeds:  from the savage who bowed before the female symbol of motherhood, to the philosophic Comtist who adores woman “in the past, the present, and the future,” as mother, wife, and daughter, the worship of the female element in nature has run side by side with that of the male; the worship is one and the same in all religions, and runs in an unbroken thread from the barbarous ages to the present time.

The doctrines of the mediation, and the divinity of Christ, and of the immortality of the soul, are as pre-Christian as the symbols which we have examined.