Daily the world grows older, and yet it remains ever young. There is the same happiness, the same bliss and joy that ever thrilled the heart of a mother. Christianity has abolished Venus, the great mother goddess, but Eve has taken her place; and if Eve too is to be deposed, mankind will still cling to the old idea of eternal womanhood, the patron of love and loveliness, of wifehood and of motherhood. APHRODITE IN ART. [Illustration: BABYLONIAN CLAY FIGURES.] The oldest assured statues of Venus, of an all-nourishing mother goddess, are perhaps the little figurines frequently found in Mesopotamia representing “the Lady” or Beltis (the feminine of Bel, “the Lord”) in the shape of a naked woman, sometimes with a child in her arms; but we may fairly well assume that even the artists of the stone age took up this all-absorbing subject, and if this be the case we may be justified in calling the torso of a naked female figure discovered in Brassempouy, a Venus,--so far the oldest Venus that has come down to us. [Illustration: THE VENUS OF BRASSEMPOUY.] [Illustration: LAKSHMI. In the Musée Guimet.] [Illustration: A CILICIAN COIN.] [Illustration: COIN OF TARSUS.] [Illustration: COIN OF GAULOS.] [Illustration: COIN OF PERGA.] In India the goddess of beauty was revered under the name of Lakshmi, and we need not doubt that she still finds worshipers among the Hindu population of to-day, but there are no statues left of the age of ancient Brahmanism. All monuments are of comparatively late origin; in fact the large mass of Hindu idols is quite modern, although it represents art and religious notions of a typically primitive character. Another and, as it seems, independent development can be traced from the worship of stone pillars or bethels. A _bethel_, i. e., “house of God,” well known from the Bible as a monument of divine revelation, developed gradually into the representation of a stiff female figure like the Diana of Ephesus, but we cannot doubt that the primitive idea of it was the worship of an all-nourishing mother. From her the Greek conception of the chaste moon goddess, the virgin Artemis or Diana, developed in course of time; but the Diana of Ephesus still preserves symbols of a pantheistic conception of the All under the allegory of a mother goddess. (For illustrations see pages 152 and 153.) [Illustration: COINS OF PERGA IN PAMPHYLIA.] [Illustration: THREE ARTEMIS MEDALS.] Among the Semites the oldest bethels, or houses of God, were pillars of stone. We need not assume that they were gods or goddesses, for judging from Biblical information they may be interpreted as monuments marking a holy place, i. e., a spot where a deity had revealed himself in some way.