THE GOD-IDEA OF THE ANCIENTS OR SEX IN RELIGION
BY ELIZA BURT GAMBLE Author of "The Evolution of Woman"
PREFACE.
Much of the material for this volume was collected during the
time that I was preparing for the press the Evolution of Woman,
or while searching for data bearing on the subject of
sex-specialization. While preparing that book for publication,
it was my intention to include within it this branch of my
investigation, but wishing to obtain certain facts relative to
the foundations of religious belief and worship which were not
accessible at that time, and knowing that considerable labor and
patience would be required in securing these facts, I decided to
publish the first part of the work, withholding for the time
being that portion of it pertaining especially to the development
of the God-idea.
As mankind construct their own gods, or as the prevailing ideas
of the unknowable reflect the inner consciousness of human
beings, a trustworthy history of the growth of religions must
correspond to the processes involved in the mental, moral, and
social development of the individual and the nation.
By means of data brought forward in these later times relative to
the growth of the God-idea, it is observed that an independent
chain of evidence has been produced in support of the facts
recently set forth bearing upon the development of the two
diverging lines of sexual demarcation. In other words, it has
been found that sex is the fundamental fact not only in the
operations of Nature but in the construction of a god.
In the Evolution of Woman it has been shown that the peculiar
inheritance of the two sexes, female and male, is the result of
the bias given to these separate lines of development during the
earliest periods of sex-differentiation; and, as this division of
labor was a necessary step in the evolutionary processes, the
rate of progress depended largely on the subsequent adjustment of
these two primary elements or forces. A comprehensive study of
prehistoric records shows that in an earlier age of existence
upon the earth, at a time when woman's influence was in the
ascendancy over that of man, human energy was directed by the
altruistic characters which originated in and have been
transmitted through the female; but after the decline of woman's
power, all human institutions, customs, forms, and habits of
thought are seen to reflect the egoistic qualities acquired by
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