first and the last, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, beginning in the spiritual world, ending in the natural, and thence returning again to the spiritual. Thus the male of mankind is the last step short of the Divine image, the female is that image itself. The whole varied world which we call Nature was latent in that Divine Wisdom whereof woman is the image; therefore man himself was latent in Her as much as any lower part of nature. This view does away with the plausible theory of spiritual equality between the sexes. Man is neither a separate being equal (spiritually) with woman, nor is he co-essential with her to the perfect humanity, unless you call it co-essential to belong to her in the sense in which our legs and arms belong to us. Therefore in regarding Deity as the Spiritual Hermaphrodite, it is of the first importance to bear in mind that the two factors of hermaphrodism are not of equal dignity—the feminine factor being the divine, the masculine the earthly. The masculine or temporal side of humanity is in principle as much evolved from and involved back to the feminine or eternal side as is any lower organic or even inorganic form of existence. Hence it follows that to sunder the spiritual hermaphrodite, in other words, to evolve the phenomenon of two separate sexes, is to sunder the baser from the nobler part of the Divine Human Being. Reducing this theory to practice, it becomes manifestly the greatest of society’s duties to repair the Fall by bringing about the elevation of womanhood, this being the true and demonstrable scheme of redemption, or the buying back by human labour the lost position of human divinity, the position where the masculine sex is but a power of the feminine, not something apart from and even antagonistic to it. The loss or fall thus described shows the nature of the Original Sin from which we need to be redeemed. It consists in reversing the proper relations of man and woman
