Herland [57]
"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