Every mythologist who has invented such stories as that of Jupiter and Alcmena, and every woman who has ever attributed her pregnancy to a divine being, call him what she may, seems completely to ignore the idea that a god who deserves the name, does not require human aid to produce a man or woman. Surely every profound thinker would say to himself, The Supreme, who could by a word create full-grown creatures "in the beginning," has not lost the power now; surely He, who could make Adam out of dust, and Eve out of a bone of man, can produce in later days similar images of the godhead, as we are told in Genesis i. 26, without accoupling with a descendant of the rib. The mythological idea, therefore, of a divine child coming from a celestial father and a terrestrial mother, has nothing profound therein, for it is essentially a bungling contrivance of some stupid man. On the other hand, such a notion could only be entertained where a grovelling or anthropomorphic idea has prevailed, or is cherished amongst a credulous people. To put the subject into the fewest words possible, a god has never--so far as thoughtful men can judge--been said to be the father in the flesh of a human being, except by frail women, or vain, foolish, or designing men. We are fortified in this conclusion by the method in which nations or sects who have each their own favourite "son of God," treat each other. None endeavour to prove that the mother of their own hero had no commerce with man, for that is impossible--all, on the other hand, ridicule the idea of there being a child without a human father, and insist that no woman's word countervails the laws of nature. But this argument is only used against opposing religionists--it has no weight against their own divine leader. The cases which we have described are wholly different from those mythological stories, in which the union of the sexes is absolutely or relatively ignored. They differ also from those in which the Creator is represented as androgynous, or being originally without sex, becomes, by an effort of will, a bisexual being, so as to bring about the creation of man and of the world. For example, when we find in the Orphic Hymns (Cory's _Ancient Fragments_, pp. 290, seq.), "Zeus is male, Immortal Zeus is female," it is clear that there was in the writer an idea of an union of the sexes being necessary to creation. But when we find Chaos alone being the progenitor of Erebus and Black Night, from which again were born Ether and Bay, and Earth the parent of Heaven and the Sea (Hesiod, Theogony, 116-130), there is a total absence of a sexual notion. This idea, however, appears in the subsequent lines which represent Earth wedding with Heaven. The same sexual notion, appears in another fragment from _Aristophanes_, (Cory, A. R, p. 293), which tells us that "Night with the black wings first produced an aerial egg, which in its time gave rise to love, whence