CHAPTER 10.

Their Religions and Our Marriages

It took me a long time, as a man, a foreigner, and a species

of Christian--I was that as much as anything--to get any clear

understanding of the religion of Herland.

Its deification of motherhood was obvious enough; but there was far more

to it than that; or, at least, than my first interpretation of that.

I think it was only as I grew to love Ellador more than I believed

anyone could love anybody, as I grew faintly to appreciate her inner

attitude and state of mind, that I began to get some glimpses of this

faith of theirs.

When I asked her about it, she tried at first to tell me, and then,

seeing me flounder, asked for more information about ours. She soon

found that we had many, that they varied widely, but had some points

in common. A clear methodical luminous mind had my Ellador, not only

reasonable, but swiftly perceptive.

She made a sort of chart, superimposing the different religions as

I described them, with a pin run through them all, as it were; their

common basis being a Dominant Power or Powers, and some Special

Behavior, mostly taboos, to please or placate. There were some common

features in certain groups of religions, but the one always present was

this Power, and the things which must be done or not done because of

it. It was not hard to trace our human imagery of the Divine Force up

through successive stages of bloodthirsty, sensual, proud, and cruel

gods of early times to the conception of a Common Father with its

corollary of a Common Brotherhood.

This pleased her very much, and when I expatiated on the Omniscience,

Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and so on, of our God, and of the loving

kindness taught by his Son, she was much impressed.

The story of the Virgin birth naturally did not astonish her, but she

was greatly puzzled by the Sacrifice, and still more by the Devil, and

the theory of Damnation.

When in an inadvertent moment I said that certain sects had believed in

infant damnation--and explained it--she sat very still indeed.

“They believed that God was Love--and Wisdom--and Power?”

“Yes--all of that.”

Her eyes grew large, her face ghastly pale.

“And yet that such a God could put little new babies to burn--for

eternity?” She fell into a sudden shuddering and left me, running

swiftly to the nearest temple.

Every smallest village had its temple, and in those gracious retreats

sat wise and noble women, quietly busy at some work of their own until

they were wanted, always ready to give comfort, light, or help, to any

applicant.

Ellador told me afterward how easily this grief of hers was assuaged,

and seemed ashamed of not having helped herself out of it.

“You see, we are not accustomed to horrible ideas,” she said, coming

back to me rather apologetically. “We haven’t any. And when we get a

thing like that into our minds it’s like--oh, like red pepper in your

eyes. So I just ran to her, blinded and almost screaming, and she took

it out so quickly--so easily!”

“How?” I asked, very curious.

“‘Why, you blessed child,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the wrong idea

altogether. You do not have to think that there ever was such a God--for

there wasn’t. Or such a happening--for there wasn’t. Nor even that this

hideous false idea was believed by anybody. But only this--that people

who are utterly ignorant will believe anything--which you certainly knew

before.’”

“Anyhow,” pursued Ellador, “she turned pale for a minute when I first

said it.”

This was a lesson to me. No wonder this whole nation of women was

peaceful and sweet in expression--they had no horrible ideas.

“Surely you had some when you began,” I suggested.

“Oh, yes, no doubt. But as soon as our religion grew to any height at

all we left them out, of course.”

From this, as from many other things, I grew to see what I finally put

in words.

“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by

your foremothers?”

“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less

than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them--and

unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”

This set me thinking in good earnest. I had always imagined--simply from

hearing it said, I suppose--that women were by nature conservative. Yet

these women, quite unassisted by any masculine spirit of enterprise, had

ignored their past and built daringly for the future.

Ellador watched me think. She seemed to know pretty much what was going

on in my mind.

“It’s because we began in a new way, I suppose. All our folks were

swept away at once, and then, after that time of despair, came those

wonder children--the first. And then the whole breathless hope of us

was for _their_ children--if they should have them. And they did! Then

there was the period of pride and triumph till we grew too numerous;

and after that, when it all came down to one child apiece, we began to

really work--to make better ones.”

“But how does this account for such a radical difference in your

religion?” I persisted.

She said she couldn’t talk about the difference very intelligently,

not being familiar with other religions, but that theirs seemed simple

enough. Their great Mother Spirit was to them what their own motherhood

was--only magnified beyond human limits. That meant that they

felt beneath and behind them an upholding, unfailing, serviceable

love--perhaps it was really the accumulated mother-love of the race they

felt--but it was a Power.

“Just what is your theory of worship?” I asked her.

“Worship? What is that?”

I found it singularly difficult to explain. This Divine Love which they

felt so strongly did not seem to ask anything of them--“any more than

our mothers do,” she said.

“But surely your mothers expect honor, reverence, obedience, from you.

You have to do things for your mothers, surely?”

“Oh, no,” she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair. “We do

things _from_ our mothers--not _for_ them. We don’t have to do things

_for_ them--they don’t need it, you know. But we have to live

on--splendidly--because of them; and that’s the way we feel about God.”

I meditated again. I thought of that God of Battles of ours,

that Jealous God, that Vengeance-is-mine God. I thought of our

world-nightmare--Hell.

“You have no theory of eternal punishment then, I take it?”

Ellador laughed. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and there were tears

in them, too. She was so sorry for me.

“How could we?” she asked, fairly enough. “We have no punishments in

life, you see, so we don’t imagine them after death.”

“Have you _no_ punishments? Neither for children nor criminals--such

mild criminals as you have?” I urged.

“Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have preventive

measures, and cures; sometimes we have to ‘send the patient to bed,’ as

it were; but that’s not a punishment--it’s only part of the treatment,”

she explained.

Then studying my point of view more closely, she added: “You see, we

recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting

force--patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method. We

credit God--our idea of God--with all that and more. Our mothers are not

angry with us--why should God be?”

“Does God mean a person to you?”

This she thought over a little. “Why--in trying to get close to it in

our minds we personify the idea, naturally; but we certainly do

not assume a Big Woman somewhere, who is God. What we call God is a

Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling Spirit, something inside of us

that we want more of. Is your God a Big Man?” she asked innocently.

“Why--yes, to most of us, I think. Of course we call it an Indwelling

Spirit just as you do, but we insist that it is Him, a Person, and a

Man--with whiskers.”

“Whiskers? Oh yes--because you have them! Or do you wear them because He

does?”

“On the contrary, we shave them off--because it seems cleaner and more

comfortable.”

“Does He wear clothes--in your idea, I mean?”

I was thinking over the pictures of God I had seen--rash advances of the

devout mind of man, representing his Omnipotent Deity as an old man in

a flowing robe, flowing hair, flowing beard, and in the light of her

perfectly frank and innocent questions this concept seemed rather

unsatisfying.

I explained that the God of the Christian world was really the ancient

Hebrew God, and that we had simply taken over the patriarchal idea--that

ancient one which quite inevitably clothed its thought of God with the

attributes of the patriarchal ruler, the grandfather.

“I see,” she said eagerly, after I had explained the genesis and

development of our religious ideals. “They lived in separate groups,

with a male head, and he was probably a little--domineering?”

“No doubt of that,” I agreed.

“And we live together without any ‘head,’ in that sense--just our chosen

leaders--that _does_ make a difference.”

“Your difference is deeper than that,” I assured her. “It is in your

common motherhood. Your children grow up in a world where everybody

loves them. They find life made rich and happy for them by the diffused

love and wisdom of all mothers. So it is easy for you to think of God in

the terms of a similar diffused and competent love. I think you are far

nearer right than we are.”

“What I cannot understand,” she pursued carefully, “is your preservation

of such a very ancient state of mind. This patriarchal idea you tell me

is thousands of years old?”

“Oh yes--four, five, six thousand--every so many.”

“And you have made wonderful progress in those years--in other things?”

“We certainly have. But religion is different. You see, our religions

come from behind us, and are initiated by some great teacher who is

dead. He is supposed to have known the whole thing and taught it,

finally. All we have to do is believe--and obey.”

“Who was the great Hebrew teacher?”

“Oh--there it was different. The Hebrew religion is an accumulation of

extremely ancient traditions, some far older than their people, and grew

by accretion down the ages. We consider it inspired--‘the Word of God.’”

“How do you know it is?”

“Because it says so.”

“Does it say so in as many words? Who wrote that in?”

I began to try to recall some text that did say so, and could not bring

it to mind.

“Apart from that,” she pursued, “what I cannot understand is why you

keep these early religious ideas so long. You have changed all your

others, haven’t you?”

“Pretty generally,” I agreed. “But this we call ‘revealed religion,’

and think it is final. But tell me more about these little temples of

yours,” I urged. “And these Temple Mothers you run to.”

Then she gave me an extended lesson in applied religion, which I will

endeavor to concentrate.

They developed their central theory of a Loving Power, and assumed that

its relation to them was motherly--that it desired their welfare and

especially their development. Their relation to it, similarly, was

filial, a loving appreciation and a glad fulfillment of its high

purposes. Then, being nothing if not practical, they set their keen

and active minds to discover the kind of conduct expected of them. This

worked out in a most admirable system of ethics. The principle of Love

was universally recognized--and used.

Patience, gentleness, courtesy, all that we call “good breeding,” was

part of their code of conduct. But where they went far beyond us was

in the special application of religious feeling to every field of

life. They had no ritual, no little set of performances called “divine

service,” save those religious pageants I have spoken of, and those were

as much educational as religious, and as much social as either. But they

had a clear established connection between everything they did--and

God. Their cleanliness, their health, their exquisite order, the rich

peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and

above all the constant progress they made--all this was their religion.

They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked out the

theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression. They lived

as if God was real and at work within them.

As for those little temples everywhere--some of the women were more

skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction, than others.

These, whatever their work might be, gave certain hours to the Temple

Service, which meant being there with all their love and wisdom and

trained thought, to smooth out rough places for anyone who needed it.

Sometimes it was a real grief, very rarely a quarrel, most often a

perplexity; even in Herland the human soul had its hours of darkness.

But all through the country their best and wisest were ready to give

help.

If the difficulty was unusually profound, the applicant was directed to

someone more specially experienced in that line of thought.

Here was a religion which gave to the searching mind a rational basis

in life, the concept of an immense Loving Power working steadily out

through them, toward good. It gave to the “soul” that sense of contact

with the inmost force, of perception of the uttermost purpose, which we

always crave. It gave to the “heart” the blessed feeling of being loved,

loved and _understood_. It gave clear, simple, rational directions as

to how we should live--and why. And for ritual it gave first those

triumphant group demonstrations, when with a union of all the arts,

the revivifying combination of great multitudes moved rhythmically with

march and dance, song and music, among their own noblest products

and the open beauty of their groves and hills. Second, it gave these

numerous little centers of wisdom where the least wise could go to the

most wise and be helped.

“It is beautiful!” I cried enthusiastically. “It is the most practical,

comforting, progressive religion I ever heard of. You _do_ love one

another--you _do_ bear one another’s burdens--you _do_ realize that a

little child is a type of the kingdom of heaven. You are more Christian

than any people I ever saw. But--how about death? And the life

everlasting? What does your religion teach about eternity?”

“Nothing,” said Ellador. “What is eternity?”

What indeed? I tried, for the first time in my life, to get a real hold

on the idea.

“It is--never stopping.”

“Never stopping?” She looked puzzled.

“Yes, life, going on forever.”

“Oh--we see that, of course. Life does go on forever, all about us.”

“But eternal life goes on _without dying_.”

“The same person?”

“Yes, the same person, unending, immortal.” I was pleased to think

that I had something to teach from our religion, which theirs had never

promulgated.

“Here?” asked Ellador. “Never to die--here?” I could see her practical

mind heaping up the people, and hurriedly reassured her.

“Oh no, indeed, not here--hereafter. We must die here, of course, but

then we ‘enter into eternal life.’ The soul lives forever.”

“How do you know?” she inquired.

“I won’t attempt to prove it to you,” I hastily continued. “Let us

assume it to be so. How does this idea strike you?”

Again she smiled at me, that adorable, dimpling, tender, mischievous,

motherly smile of hers. “Shall I be quite, quite honest?”

“You couldn’t be anything else,” I said, half gladly and half a little

sorry. The transparent honesty of these women was a never-ending

astonishment to me.

“It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,” she said calmly. “And if

true, most disagreeable.”

Now I had always accepted the doctrine of personal immortality as

a thing established. The efforts of inquiring spiritualists, always

seeking to woo their beloved ghosts back again, never seemed to me

necessary. I don’t say I had ever seriously and courageously discussed

the subject with myself even; I had simply assumed it to be a fact.

And here was the girl I loved, this creature whose character constantly

revealed new heights and ranges far beyond my own, this superwoman of a

superland, saying she thought immortality foolish! She meant it, too.

“What do you _want_ it for?” she asked.

“How can you _not_ want it!” I protested. “Do you want to go out like a

candle? Don’t you want to go on and on--growing and--and--being happy,

forever?”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child--and my

child’s child--to go on--and they will. Why should _I_ want to?”

“But it means Heaven!” I insisted. “Peace and Beauty and Comfort

and Love--with God.” I had never been so eloquent on the subject of

religion. She could be horrified at Damnation, and question the justice

of Salvation, but Immortality--that was surely a noble faith.

“Why, Van,” she said, holding out her hands to me. “Why Van--darling!

How splendid of you to feel it so keenly. That’s what we all want, of

course--Peace and Beauty, and Comfort and Love--with God! And Progress

too, remember; Growth, always and always. That is what our religion

teaches us to want and to work for, and we do!”

“But that is _here_,” I said, “only for this life on earth.”

“Well? And do not you in your country, with your beautiful religion of

love and service have it here, too--for this life--on earth?”

None of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about the evils of

our own beloved land. It was all very well for us to assume them to

be necessary and essential, and to criticize--strictly among

ourselves--their all-too-perfect civilization, but when it came to

telling them about the failures and wastes of our own, we never could

bring ourselves to do it.

Moreover, we sought to avoid too much discussion, and to press the

subject of our approaching marriages.

Jeff was the determined one on this score.

“Of course they haven’t any marriage ceremony or service, but we can

make it a sort of Quaker wedding, and have it in the temple--it is the

least we can do for them.”

It was. There was so little, after all, that we could do for them. Here

we were, penniless guests and strangers, with no chance even to use

our strength and courage--nothing to defend them from or protect them

against.

“We can at least give them our names,” Jeff insisted.

They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever we asked, to

please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what

good it would do.

Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession. “You are

going to be Mrs. Nicholson,” he said. “Mrs. T. O. Nicholson. That shows

everyone that you are my wife.”

“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.

“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.

But Jeff took it up eagerly: “And a husband is the man who belongs to

a woman. It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is the

ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together--‘until death

do us part,’” he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion.

“What makes us all feel foolish,” I told the girls, “is that here we

have nothing to give you--except, of course, our names.”

“Do your women have no names before they are married?” Celis suddenly

demanded.

“Why, yes,” Jeff explained. “They have their maiden names--their

father’s names, that is.”

“And what becomes of them?” asked Alima.

“They change them for their husbands’, my dear,” Terry answered her.

“Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives’ ‘maiden names’?”

“Oh, no,” he laughed. “The man keeps his own and gives it to her, too.”

“Then she just loses hers and takes a new one--how unpleasant! We won’t

do that!” Alima said decidedly.

Terry was good-humored about it. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do

so long as we have that wedding pretty soon,” he said, reaching a strong

brown hand after Alima’s, quite as brown and nearly as strong.

“As to giving us things--of course we can see that you’d like to, but

we are glad you can’t,” Celis continued. “You see, we love you just for

yourselves--we wouldn’t want you to--to pay anything. Isn’t it enough to

know that you are loved personally--and just as men?”

Enough or not, that was the way we were married. We had a great triple

wedding in the biggest temple of all, and it looked as if most of the

nation was present. It was very solemn and very beautiful. Someone had

written a new song for the occasion, nobly beautiful, about the New Hope

for their people--the New Tie with other lands--Brotherhood as well as

Sisterhood, and, with evident awe, Fatherhood.

Terry was always restive under their talk of fatherhood. “Anybody’d

think we were High Priests of--of Philoprogenitiveness!” he protested.

“These women think of _nothing_ but children, seems to me! We’ll teach

’em!”

He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima so uncertain

in her moods of reception, that Jeff and I feared the worst. We tried to

caution him--much good that did. The big handsome fellow drew himself up

to his full height, lifted that great chest of his, and laughed.

“There are three separate marriages,” he said. “I won’t interfere with

yours--nor you with mine.”

So the great day came, and the countless crowds of women, and we three

bridegrooms without any supporting “best men,” or any other men to back

us up, felt strangely small as we came forward.

Somel and Zava and Moadine were on hand; we were thankful to have them,

too--they seemed almost like relatives.

There was a splendid procession, wreathing dances, the new anthem I

spoke of, and the whole great place pulsed with feeling--the deep awe,

the sweet hope, the wondering expectation of a new miracle.

“There has been nothing like this in the country since our Motherhood

began!” Somel said softly to me, while we watched the symbolic marches.

“You see, it is the dawn of a new era. You don’t know how much you mean

to us. It is not only Fatherhood--that marvelous dual parentage to

which we are strangers--the miracle of union in life-giving--but it is

Brotherhood. You are the rest of the world. You join us to our kind--to

all the strange lands and peoples we have never seen. We hope to know

them--to love and help them--and to learn of them. Ah! You cannot know!”

Thousands of voices rose in the soaring climax of that great Hymn of The

Coming Life. By the great Altar of Motherhood, with its crown of fruit

and flowers, stood a new one, crowned as well. Before the Great Over

Mother of the Land and her ring of High Temple Counsellors, before that

vast multitude of calm-faced mothers and holy-eyed maidens, came forward

our own three chosen ones, and we, three men alone in all that land,

joined hands with them and made our marriage vows.