Page:Who is Jesus?.pdf/143

 She becomes, as it were, a helper to the male to reproduce himself. We all instinctively recognize the justice of speaking of the sons of Abraham and Jacob rather than of the daughters of their wives. The inheritance is through the sons.

The human soul is reproduced in precisely the same way that the mere animal soul is reproduced, through the instrumentality of parents, the father's life providing the life-germ, or seed, that in which the germ of life exists capable of reproducing itself, and the mother's life providing the soil in which this new germ of life grows. This seems to us entirely self-evident, and it accounts for numberless facts. It is confirmed by reason, and is to us the obvious basis for the perpetuation of human life.

The thing which we wish to emphasize is this: The soul in its incipient form comes from the father and is a projection of the father's life. It is the life-principle capable of reproducing itself. It is the father's life in miniature, shaped in a rudimentary way as a receptacle for the development of a new life. In the ground of the mother's life it receives its physical or material body, plus the modifying influences from her