of the divine mother. In the early days of the Church there are accounts and rumours of sects which endeavoured to establish the worship of Mary alongside that of the Father and the Son, and there is evidence to show that the notion of the Holy Ghost corresponds in one of its aspects to that of a female deity who completes the natural trinity of Father, Mother and Son[181]. In the Roman Church Mary, as the mother of Christ, has received a widespread and often profound (though to some extent of course unofficial) adoration, being regarded perhaps especially as the helper in time of trouble, to whom men and women may go for comfort, protection, guidance or forgiveness in just the same way as they did to their earthly mother in their childhood: an adoration which has tended to call forth a feeling of disgust and horror in the Protestant Church, in which the more primite Christian tradition of the repression of the mother-regarding feelings has in this respect been kept alive[182]. [Sidenote: The Immaculate Conception] The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which has played such a prominent part in Christian theology and theological discussion, is of course only one of the many similar instances of the notion of the supernatural birth[183]. Like many of these other instances, it is due, not merely to the fact of its being a relic from a time when there was little certainty or knowledge as to the nature of paternity, but to the fact that it constitutes an active expression of a strong (though usually unconscious) wish--a wish that is compounded from a number of separate, though of course related, elements, of which the chief are perhaps the following:--(1) the desire for "purity" on the part of the mother, in order that she may belong to the revered rather than to the sexually attractive but despised group of women (_cp._ above p. 110)--a desire which at the same time purifies the mother-regarding love of its grosser elements and renders it less liable to repression; (2) the desire to be independent of the father and to owe nothing to him (_cp._ above p. 109); (3) a desire to avoid sexual jealousy of the father together with the envy, hostility or contempt that would inevitably--especially in view of the general Christian attitude towards sex--accompany the notion of the father as a sexually active being. These factors combine to make the idea of sexual relations between the parents one that is peculiarly distasteful to their children, particularly when it is a question not of ordinary human parents with their admitted imperfections but of their heavenly and perfected counterparts, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception satisfactorily removes the necessity for this idea[184]. [Sidenote: Open depiction of the parents and of the Œdipus complex in primitive religions]