Herland
was greatly puzzled by the Sacrifice, and still more by the Devil, and
the theory of Damnation.
When in an inadvertent moment I said that certain sects had believed in
infant damnation--and explained it--she sat very still indeed.
“They believed that God was Love--and Wisdom--and Power?”
“Yes--all of that.”
Her eyes grew large, her face ghastly pale.
“And yet that such a God could put little new babies to burn--for
eternity?” She fell into a sudden shuddering and left me, running
swiftly to the nearest temple.
Every smallest village had its temple, and in those gracious retreats
sat wise and noble women, quietly busy at some work of their own until
they were wanted, always ready to give comfort, light, or help, to any
applicant.
Ellador told me afterward how easily this grief of hers was assuaged,
and seemed ashamed of not having helped herself out of it.
“You see, we are not accustomed to horrible ideas,” she said, coming
back to me rather apologetically. “We haven’t any. And when we get a
thing like that into our minds it’s like--oh, like red pepper in your
eyes. So I just ran to her, blinded and almost screaming, and she took
it out so quickly--so easily!”
“How?” I asked, very curious.
“‘Why, you blessed child,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the wrong idea
altogether. You do not have to think that there ever was such a God--for
there wasn’t. Or such a happening--for there wasn’t. Nor even that this
hideous false idea was believed by anybody. But only this--that people
who are utterly ignorant will believe anything--which you certainly knew
before.’”
“Anyhow,” pursued Ellador, “she turned pale for a minute when I first
said it.”
This was a lesson to me. No wonder this whole nation of women was
peaceful and sweet in expression--they had no horrible ideas.
“Surely you had some when you began,” I suggested.
“Oh, yes, no doubt. But as soon as our religion grew to any height at
all we left them out, of course.”
From this, as from many other things, I grew to see what I finally put
in words.
“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by
your foremothers?”
“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less
than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them--and
unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”
This set me thinking in good earnest. I had always imagined--simply from
hearing it said, I suppose--that women were by nature conservative. Yet
these women, quite unassisted by any masculine spirit of enterprise, had
ignored their past and built daringly for the future.
Ellador watched me think. She seemed to know pretty much what was going
on in my mind.
“It’s because we began in a new way, I suppose. All our folks were
swept away at once, and then, after that time of despair, came those
wonder children--the first. And then the whole breathless hope of us
was for _their_ children--if they should have them. And they did! Then
there was the period of pride and triumph till we grew too numerous;
and after that, when it all came down to one child apiece, we began to
really work--to make better ones.”
“But how does this account for such a radical difference in your
religion?” I persisted.
She said she couldn’t talk about the difference very intelligently,
not being familiar with other religions, but that theirs seemed simple
enough. Their great Mother Spirit was to them what their own motherhood
was--only magnified beyond human limits. That meant that they
felt beneath and behind them an upholding, unfailing, serviceable
love--perhaps it was really the accumulated mother-love of the race they
felt--but it was a Power.
“Just what is your theory of worship?” I asked her.
“Worship? What is that?”
I found it singularly difficult to explain. This Divine Love which they
felt so strongly did not seem to ask anything of them--“any more than
our mothers do,” she said.
“But surely your mothers expect honor, reverence, obedience, from you.
You have to do things for your mothers, surely?”
“Oh, no,” she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair. “We do
things _from_ our mothers--not _for_ them. We don’t have to do things
_for_ them--they don’t need it, you know. But we have to live
on--splendidly--because of them; and that’s the way we feel about God.”
I meditated again. I thought of that God of Battles of ours,
that Jealous God, that Vengeance-is-mine God. I thought of our
world-nightmare--Hell.
“You have no theory of eternal punishment then, I take it?”
Ellador laughed. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and there were tears
in them, too. She was so sorry for me.
“How could we?” she asked, fairly enough. “We have no punishments in
life, you see, so we don’t imagine them after death.”
“Have you _no_ punishments? Neither for children nor criminals--such
mild criminals as you have?” I urged.
“Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have preventive
measures, and cures; sometimes we have to ‘send the patient to bed,’ as
it were; but that’s not a punishment--it’s only part of the treatment,”
she explained.
Then studying my point of view more closely, she added: “You see, we
recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting
force--patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method. We
credit God--our idea of God--with all that and more. Our mothers are not
angry with us--why should God be?”
“Does God mean a person to you?”
This she thought over a little. “Why--in trying to get close to it in
our minds we personify the idea, naturally; but we certainly do
not assume a Big Woman somewhere, who is God. What we call God is a
Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling Spirit, something inside of us
that we want more of. Is your God a Big Man?” she asked innocently.
“Why--yes, to most of us, I think. Of course we call it an Indwelling
Spirit just as you do, but we insist that it is Him, a Person, and a
Man--with whiskers.”
“Whiskers? Oh yes--because you have them! Or do you wear them because He
does?”
“On the contrary, we shave them off--because it seems cleaner and more
comfortable.”
“Does He wear clothes--in your idea, I mean?”
I was thinking over the pictures of God I had seen--rash advances of the
devout mind of man, representing his Omnipotent Deity as an old man in
a flowing robe, flowing hair, flowing beard, and in the light of her
perfectly frank and innocent questions this concept seemed rather
unsatisfying.
I explained that the God of the Christian world was really the ancient
Hebrew God, and that we had simply taken over the patriarchal idea--that
ancient one which quite inevitably clothed its thought of God with the
attributes of the patriarchal ruler, the grandfather.
“I see,” she said eagerly, after I had explained the genesis and
development of our religious ideals. “They lived in separate groups,
with a male head, and he was probably a little--domineering?”
“No doubt of that,” I agreed.
“And we live together without any ‘head,’ in that sense--just our chosen
leaders--that _does_ make a difference.”
“Your difference is deeper than that,” I assured her. “It is in your
common motherhood. Your children grow up in a world where everybody
loves them. They find life made rich and happy for them by the diffused
love and wisdom of all mothers. So it is easy for you to think of God in
the terms of a similar diffused and competent love. I think you are far
nearer right than we are.”
“What I cannot understand,” she pursued carefully, “is your preservation
of such a very ancient state of mind. This patriarchal idea you tell me
is thousands of years old?”
“Oh yes--four, five, six thousand--every so many.”
“And you have made wonderful progress in those years--in other things?”
“We certainly have. But religion is different. You see, our religions
come from behind us, and are initiated by some great teacher who is
dead. He is supposed to have known the whole thing and taught it,
finally. All we have to do is believe--and obey.”
“Who was the great Hebrew teacher?”
“Oh--there it was different. The Hebrew religion is an accumulation of
extremely ancient traditions, some far older than their people, and grew
by accretion down the ages. We consider it inspired--‘the Word of God.’”
“How do you know it is?”
“Because it says so.”
“Does it say so in as many words? Who wrote that in?”
I began to try to recall some text that did say so, and could not bring
it to mind.
“Apart from that,” she pursued, “what I cannot understand is why you
keep these early religious ideas so long. You have changed all your
others, haven’t you?”
“Pretty generally,” I agreed. “But this we call ‘revealed religion,’
and think it is final. But tell me more about these little temples of
yours,” I urged. “And these Temple Mothers you run to.”
Then she gave me an extended lesson in applied religion, which I will
endeavor to concentrate.
They developed their central theory of a Loving Power, and assumed that
its relation to them was motherly--that it desired their welfare and
especially their development. Their relation to it, similarly, was
filial, a loving appreciation and a glad fulfillment of its high
purposes. Then, being nothing if not practical, they set their keen
and active minds to discover the kind of conduct expected of them. This
worked out in a most admirable system of ethics. The principle of Love
was universally recognized--and used.
Patience, gentleness, courtesy, all that we call “good breeding,” was
part of their code of conduct. But where they went far beyond us was
in the special application of religious feeling to every field of
life. They had no ritual, no little set of performances called “divine
service,” save those religious pageants I have spoken of, and those were
as much educational as religious, and as much social as either. But they
had a clear established connection between everything they did--and
God. Their cleanliness, their health, their exquisite order, the rich
peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and
above all the constant progress they made--all this was their religion.
They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked out the
theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression. They lived
as if God was real and at work within them.
As for those little temples everywhere--some of the women were more
skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction, than others.
These, whatever their work might be, gave certain hours to the Temple
Service, which meant being there with all their love and wisdom and
trained thought, to smooth out rough places for anyone who needed it.
Sometimes it was a real grief, very rarely a quarrel, most often a
perplexity; even in Herland the human soul had its hours of darkness.
But all through the country their best and wisest were ready to give
help.
If the difficulty was unusually profound, the applicant was directed to
someone more specially experienced in that line of thought.
Here was a religion which gave to the searching mind a rational basis
in life, the concept of an immense Loving Power working steadily out
through them, toward good. It gave to the “soul” that sense of contact
with the inmost force, of perception of the uttermost purpose, which we
always crave. It gave to the “heart” the blessed feeling of being loved,
loved and _understood_. It gave clear, simple, rational directions as
to how we should live--and why. And for ritual it gave first those
triumphant group demonstrations, when with a union of all the arts,
the revivifying combination of great multitudes moved rhythmically with
march and dance, song and music, among their own noblest products