"How essential to the consistency of the Catholic system is this doctrine of duality you may judge by the shortcomings of the theologies which reject it. Unitarianism blunders alike in regard to the Trinity and the Duality. Affecting to see in God a Father, it denies him the possibility of having either spouse or offspring. More rational than such a creed as this was the primitive worship of sex, as represented by the male and female principles in nature. In no gross sense was the symbolism of such a system conceived, gross as its practice may have become, and as it would appear to the notions of modern conventionalism. For no religion is founded upon intentional depravity. Searching back for the origin of life, men stopped at the earliest point to which they could trace it, and exalted the reproductive organs into symbols of the Creator. The practice was at least calculated to procure respect for a side of nature liable under an exclusively spiritual regime to be relegated to undue contempt. "It appears certain that the names of the Hebrew deity bear the sense I have indicated; El, the root of Elhoim, the name under which God was known to the Israelites prior to their entry into Canaan, signifying the masculine sex only; while Jahveh, or Jehovah, denotes both sexes in combination. The religious rites practised by Abraham and Jacob prove incontestably their adherence to this, even then, ancient mode of symbolising deity; and though after the entry into Canaan, the leaders and reformers of the Israelites strove to keep the people from exchanging the worship of their own divinity for that of the exclusively feminine principle worshipped by the Canaanites with unbridled licence under the name of Ashera, yet the indigenous religion became closely incorporated with the Jewish; and even Moses himself fell back upon it when, yielding to a pressing emergency, he gave his sanction to the prevailing Tree and Serpent worship by his elevation of a brazen serpent upon a pole or cross. For all portions of this structure constitute the most universally accepted symbols of sex in the world. "It is to India that we must go for the earliest traces of these things. The Jews originated nothing, though they were skilful appropriators and adapters of other men's effects. Brahma, the first person in the Hindoo Triad, was the original self-existent being, inappreciable by sense, who commenced the work of creation by creating the waters with a thought, as described in the Institutes of Manu. The waters, regarded as the source of all subsequent life, became identified with the feminine principle in nature--whence the origin of the mystic rite of baptism--and the atmosphere was the divine breath or spirit. The description in Genesis of the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, indicates the influence upon the Jews of the Hindoo theogony to which they had access through Persia.