that God should be a perfect
man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between
Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been
surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded
as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.

And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity
into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter
had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That
fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in
accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for
such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the
Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke
i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification
with the Word.

In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather
of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the
personalization of God by constituting Him a family.

In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap.
lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His
mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to
counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who
always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when
he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father;
the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that
warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky
sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no
justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and
imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and