With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as "The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the evidences of sex seen in plants and animals. It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater than that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act of procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child" became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as an object of worship. Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell. The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance. At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the reproductive power.