f the Christian feast of the Annunciation, when
the power of the highest overshadowed Mary of Nazareth. Thus in India,
we have Devaki and Krishna; in Egypt, Osiris and Horus--the "Saviour of
the World;" in Christendom, Mary and Christ; the pictures and carvings
of India and Egypt would be indistinguishable from those of Europe, were
it not for the differences of dress. Apis, the sacred Egyptian bull, was
always born without an earthly father, and his mother never had a second
calf. So the later Sun-god, Jesus, is born without sexual intercourse,
and Mary never bears another child. Jupiter visits Leda as a swan; God
visits Mary as an overshadowing dove. The salutation of Gabriel to Mary
is curiously like that of Mercury to Electra: "Hail, most happy of all
women, you whom Jupiter has honoured with his couch; your blood will
give laws to the world, I am the messenger of the gods." The mother of
Fohi, the great Chinese God, became _enceinte_ by walking in the
footsteps of a giant. The mother of Hercules did not lose her virginity.
The savages of St. Domingo represented the chief divinity by a female
figure called the "mother of God." On Friday, the day of Freya, or
Venus, many Christians still eat only fish, fish being sacred to the
female deity.

In Comtism we find the latest development of woman-worship, wherein the
"emotional sex" becomes the sacred sex, to be guarded, cherished,
sustained, adored; and thus in the youngest religion the stamp of the
eldest is found.

Thus womanhood has been worshipped in all ages of the world, and
maternity has been deified by all creeds: from the savage who bowed
before the female symbol of motherhood, to the philosophic Comtist who
adores woman "in the past, the present, and the future," as mother,
wife, and daughter, the worship of the female element in nature has run
side by side with that of the male; the worship is one and the same in
all religions, and runs in an unbroken thread from the barbarous ages to
the present time.

The doctrines of the mediation, and the divinity of Christ, and of the
immortality of the soul, are as pre-Christian as the symbols which we
have examined.

The idea of _the Mediator_ comes to us from Persia, and the title was
borne by Mithra before it was ascribed to Christ. Zoroaster taught that
there was existence itself, the unknown, the eternal, "Zeruane Akerne,"
"time without bounds." From this issued Ormuzd, the good, the light, the
creator of all.