A NEW COMMENTARY ON THE WOMAN'S BIBLE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2779, 19 June 1907, Page 86

A NEW COMMENTARY ON THE WOMAN'S BIBLE.

J»V JESTTE iIACEAY.

I In a former article I indicated tlie biological conclusion announced by Swiney in the ''Cosmic Precession,"' that the offshoot of the male element from the mysterious beginnings of material rootber•hood was, in itself a comparative failure of maternal energy, and a utilisation of waste products ; moreover, that the consequences of the process we have known as th-e Fall were bound up w lth the ruin of the Matriarcbate, or golden age. To that succeeded the iron age of masculine ascendancy. As she says, our piesent civilisation, with Us wars, frauds, slums, insolvencies, land monopolies, starvations under miscalled protection, and general blending of sham and violence, "is the extreme efflorescence of male kataboKem," or the disintegrative and destructive agencies in humanity. Not the less does she see the beneficent upbuilding anabolism of the mother at -work in our day. "The spirit of the Moth«i is abroad ;" "The day of the Mother is coming," that day of spiritual oneness, power, virtue, sublime consciousness which Christ taught as they could hear to the darkened spirits of His day under the name of the" Kingdom of Heaven, which is within us. Hhe Mother, soiled, stunted, and blinded as she was and is, still kept the earth in touch with the Divine consciousness by giving the world a Socrates, a_ Plato, a Buddha, a Zoroaster. Her gifts, indeed, they were, since hers alone is the power to transmit high new impressions, though man at his highest can conserve for the race what she has won. And once in the fulness of time the Mother received back her primeval crown in the virgin birth of Bethlehem, the earnest of that pure and perfect life the Divine Son came to impart. Slowly man, the son, is apprehending that life, and becoming what he was destined through all error and tribulation to be — the Mother's protection, the Mother's helper and workman in her age-long task. In his thousands and tens of thousands the son is coming to see himself and her in their true relation ; coming to see that \ he has reached what he knows of Divine i through her, and that, as a wise man I has said, "he only becomes human in so far as he approaches to woman." Science and spirit have long repudiated the arrogant belief "that woman is the lesser man." It is left for the real lesser man to learn what the greater knows already, and to foresee with such minds as Comte and Henry Drummond the time when the rudimentary state and temporary factor of Katabolic masculinity will have disappeared from the new heaven and the new earth. But when, asks Mrs Swiney, will these things be? When will the moan of tortured womanhood cease in China, in India, in Africa, ay, and ait our own proud gates? When woman is great and faithful enough to bear sons who are not tyrants and murderers. Moreover, it is "written in the unchanging books of the Eternal that a man must suffer all he has inflicted. Plato knew that when he said "Vicious men when they die are women in their next incarnation."

The highest conditions, Mrs Swiney points out, encourage the birth of daughters. Already statistics declare that male births are declining, while the physical type of the finest thinkers and artists is notably approaching a beautiful female character, even as the Greeks ages ago portrayed their highest heroes with faces like noble women, and Eastern art portrayed the perfected Buddha as nowise masculine.

Mrs Swiney's mystic explanation of many parts of Scripture by the doctrines of esoteric feminism may command as much or as little credence as mysticism usually obtains from the objective popular mind. If these explanations cannot be proved the onus of gainsaying them lies on theologians who have better to offer. That the Prince of the Power of the Air is the Katabolic masculine principle is as reasonable a statement as most that have been made on this passage. That the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is not to be forgiven in this life, nor in many lives to come, is the degradation of womanhood acquires significant probability if we are to believe that for at least three centuries of our era the Holy Ghost was spoken of as feminine. And here we may return for a moment to the writer's previous assertion that in addition to the feminine significance of "Elohim," the names translated as "Lord of Sabaoth."' "Shaddai," "The Almighty," are also feminine forms in Hebrew. Speaking to whom it may concern, and in deep reverence, Mrs Swinev is at no pains to excuse or defend herself for assertions that will seem no less than blasphemy to eonseivativ© theologians. She is seemingly not aware that sho needs any such dpfence, since she »s so far removed from the anthropomorphic bias which arbitrarily built up the hard and fast masculinity of our conception of Deity. Her position is clear on her own premises. Given that science has declared one sex primeval and everlasting, while the. other is secondary and temporary ; given that spirituality identifies the characteristic functions of one sex with the only real progress of the race, while those of the other are active factors in its disintegration and declay ; given, moreover, that an inevitable anthropomorphism compels us to define Deity to ourselves as either masculine or feminine, the open mind at once declares which is the more logical an-d reverent conception. Such, one may imagine, is her positon.

I have spoken of Mrs Swiney's express and literal belief in the Virgin Birth of Christ. She is moved to scornful amazement at the easy materialism of a section of the Christian C'l'iircb wlnc-h is content to hold this and the dnctrme of tl'-e Resurrection in a mere oi less fi^uidtive seme She Iteirelf holds these events not as miracles, but as prefigur.itien.s of the natural law wlucli will prevail amid per-

fected humanity, when the Mother, enlightened, and free, will bear radiant thought-children whose bodies cannot sse corruption. But Mrs Swiney does not write wholly as a mystic. Here and there she speaks with delicate, but uranastakable, clearness on the misuses which have made womanhood a torture and humanity a plague-spotted tiling. It is rat our province to touch further on theee subjects. One can but think that the time is ripe to do more than whisper these healing and wise words from ear to ear. Would, rather, for the dear sake of woman, tlrtt they were written in iron ard gold on our high places! As I have striven to show, nothing is further from the writer's temperament than vulgar sex animosities or cheap sex triumph. She lias not professed to originate doctrines, but to collate from various sources. As her guides on these lofty planes of thought have been learned and gifted msn. so tlis theme of her latter pages is mainly the growing self-surrender of manlioo<ij xr-itHout -wliicK -fche cannat be perfected, nor the kingdom arrive. I cannot more fitly conclude t'bis notice of a remarkable book than by giving her own words in the lesi chapter : — "As through the woman tbe Divine Man was born, so through the man shall the Divine Woman be born, both owing their origin to the sacrifice of the e-elf. As woman has sacrificed herself during the ages in order to bring forth the Divine Son, so shall man sacrifice himself so that the Divine Daughter may be developed. The one is by the surrender of tlie body, the other by the surrender of the will. The one is through the diremption of body and soul ; the other is through the unity of soul and body. "When this supreme truth is fully recognised, with its consequent logical deductions, then, ss day follows night, the woman question will be eolved : for woman herself will be understood. At present she is th<? Sphinx of humanity — the inexplicable rk!<tte of the world."