Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/195

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WOMAN IN THE NEW ERA
191

by kings, princes, and nobles. In India, to the present day, hosts of men and women worship the mother-father God, creator, preserver, and destroyer.

Turn now to nature interpreted by science. As I read its elementary truths, they teach the same. Here, also, we have the woman-principle brought prominently before us. Chemistry has its mysterious affinities, its rushing together of two elements with, as result, the production of a force which has qualities possessed by neither. Botany, which gives us the life-history of the plants, tells us plainly of the dual power, the mother-father, the eternal marriage of the worlds. Nay, even astronomy, perhaps the most abstruse of all the sciences, has its energy and inertia, one working with the other to produce that harmony of the suns and planets in their eternal progression, the order of whose movements was discovered and formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Law of Gravitation.

And when through religions which, as I conceive them, are spiritual ladders to the discovery of intellectual and spiritual truth, and through science the way to the same truth on a different plane, we rise to humanity in its higher phases—human conscience, human society, human polity—we have still the two aspects—the eternal marriage; or, rather, we have the promise of a new divine and human order founded on this, which will indeed be that Kingdom of God upon earth promised by the Son of Man.

I propose, then, to take as a basis of what I have which opens