It is clear, too, that this desire for children, for a powerful clan, for the increase of the people, was a dominant one everywhere in Ephraim and in Judah. “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,” says Jahweh to his votary by the mouth of the poet; “thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” says another psalmist; “they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” Again and again the promise is repeated that the seed of Abraham or of Joseph or of Ishmael shall be numerous as the stars of heaven or the sands of the sea: Jahweh’s chief prerogative is evidently the gift of increase, extended often to cattle and asses, but always including at least sons and daughters. If Israel obeys Jahweh, says the Deuteronomist, “Jahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.” Now, elsewhere throughout the world we find in like manner a certain class of phallic gods who are specially conceived as givers of fertility, and to whom prayers and offerings are made by barren women who desire children. And the point to observe is that these gods are usually (perhaps one might even say always) embodied in stone pillars {195}or upright monoliths. The practical great god of India--the god whom the people really worship--is Mahadeo; and Mahadeo is, as we know, a cylinder of stone, to whom the _linga puja_ is performed, and to whom barren women pray for offspring. There are sacred stones in western Europe, now crowned by a cross, at which barren women still pray to God and the Madonna, or to some local saint, for the blessing of children. It is allowed that while the obelisk is from one point of view (in later theory) a ray of the sun, it is from another point of view (in earlier origin) a “symbol of the generative power of nature,"--which is only another way of saying that it is an ancestral stone of phallic virtue. In short, without laying too much stress upon the connexion, we may conclude generally that the upright pillar came early to be regarded, not merely as a memento of the dead and an abode of the ghost or indwelling god, but also in some mysterious and esoteric way as a representative of the male and generative principle.