ELIZA R. SNOW'S INVOCATION--THE ETERNAL FATHER AND MOTHER--ORIGIN OF
THE SUBLIME THOUGHT POPULARLY ATTRIBUTED TO THEODORE PARKER--BASIC IDEA
OF THE MORMON THEOLOGY.
Joseph endowed the church with the genesis of a grand theology, and
Brigham has reared the colossal fabric of a new civilization; but woman
herself must sing of her celestial origin, and her relationship to the
majesty of creation.
Inspired by the mystic memories of the past, Eliza R. Snow has made
popular in the worship of the saints a knowledge of the grand family,
in our _primeval spirit-home_. The following gem, which opens the first
volume of her poems, will give at once a rare view of the spiritual
type of the high priestess of the Mormon Church, and of the divine
drama of Mormonism itself. It is entitled, "Invocation; or, the Eternal
Father and Mother
O! my Father, thou that dwellest
In the high and holy place;
When shall I regain thy presence,
And again behold thy face?
In thy glorious habitation,
Did my spirit once reside?
In my first primeval childhood,
Was I nurtured by thy side?
For a wise and glorious purpose,
Thou hast placed me here on earth;
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth.
Yet oft-times a secret something,
Whisper'd, "You're a stranger here;"
And I felt that I had wandered
From a more exalted sphere.
I had learned to call thee Father,
Through thy spirit from on high;
But until the key of knowledge
Was restored, I knew not why.
In the heavens are parents single?
No; the thought makes reason stare;
Truth is reason; truth eternal,
Tells me I've a Mother there.
When I leave this frail existence--
When I lay this mortal by,
Father, Mother, may I meet you
In your royal court on high?
Then at length, when I've completed
All you sent me forth to do,
With your mutual approbation,
Let me come and dwell with you.
A divine drama set to song. And as it is but a choral dramatization,
in the simple hymn form, of the celestial themes revealed through
Joseph Smith, it will strikingly illustrate the vast system of Mormon
theology, which links the heavens and the earths.
It is well remembered what an ecstacy filled the minds of the
transcendental Christians of America, when the voice of Theodore
Parker, bursting into the fervor of a new revelation, addressed, in
prayer, our Father and Mother in heaven!
An archangel proclamation that!
Henceforth shall the mother half of creation be worshipped with that of
the God-Father; and in that worship woman, by the very association of
ideas, shall be exalted in the coming civilization.
Wonderful revelation, Brother Theodore; worthy thy glorious intellect!
Quite as wonderful that it was not universal long before thy day!
But it will be strange news to many that years before Theodore Parker
breathed that theme in public prayer, the Mormon people sang their hymn
of invocation to the Father and Mother in heaven, given them by the
Hebraic pen of Eliza R. Snow.
And in this connection it will be proper to relate the fact that a
Mormon woman once lived as a servant in the house of Theodore Parker.
With a disciple's pardonable cunning she was in the habit of leaving
Mormon books in the way of her master. It is not unlikely that the
great transcendentalist had read the Mormon poetess' hymn to "Our
Father-and-Mother God!"
And perhaps it will appear still more strange to the reader, who may
have been told that woman in the Mormon scheme ranked low--almost to
the barbarian scale--to learn that the revelation of the Father and
Mother of creation, given through the Mormon prophet, and set to song
by a kindred spirit, is the basic idea of the whole Mormon theology.
The hymn of invocation not only treats our God parents in this grand
primeval sense, but the poetess weaves around their parental centre the
divine drama of the pre-existence of worlds.
This celestial theme was early revealed to the church by the prophet,
and for now nearly forty years the hymn of invocation has been familiar
in the meetings of the saints.
A marvel indeed is this, that at the time modern Christians, and
even "philosophers," were treating this little earth, with its six
thousand years of mortal history, as the sum of the intelligent
universe--to which was added this life's sequel, with the gloom of hell
prevailing--the Mormon people, in their very household talk, conversed
and sang of an endless succession of worlds.
They talked of their own pre-existing lives. They came into the divine
action ages ago, played their parts in a primeval state, and played
them well. Hence were they the first fruits of the gospel. They
scarcely limited their pre-existing lives to a beginning, or compassed
their events, recorded in other worlds, in a finite story. Down
through the cycles of all eternity they had come, and they were now
entabernacled spirits passing through a mortal probation.
It was of such a theme that "Sister Eliza" sang; and with such a theme
her hymn of invocation to our Father and Mother in heaven soon made the
saints familiar in every land.
Let us somewhat further expound the theme of this hymn, which our
poetess could not fully embody in the simple form of verse.
God the Father and God the Mother stand, in the grand pre-existing
view, as the origin and centre of the spirits of all the generations of
mortals who had been entabernacled on this earth.
First and noblest of this great family was Jesus Christ, who was the
elder brother, in spirit, of the whole human race. These constituted a
world-family of pre-existing souls.
Brightest among these spirits, and nearest in the circle to our Father
and Mother in heaven (the Father being Adam), were Seth, Enoch, Noah
and Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus Christ--indeed that glorious
cohort of men and women, whose lives have left immortal records in the
world's history. Among these the Mormon faith would rank Joseph Smith,
Brigham Young, and their compeers.
In that primeval spirit-state, these were also associated with a divine
sisterhood. One can easily imagine the inspired authoress of the hymn
on pre-existence, to have been a bright angel among this sister throng.
Her hymn is as a memory of that primeval life, and her invocation is as
the soul's yearning for the Father and Mother in whose courts she was
reared, and near whose side her spirit was nurtured.
These are the sons and daughters of Adam--the Ancient of Days--the
Father and God of the whole human family. These are the sons and
daughters of Michael, who is Adam, the father of the spirits of all our
race.
These are the sons and daughters of Eve, the Mother of a world.
What a practical Unitarianism is this! The Christ is not dragged from
his heavenly estate, to be mere mortal, but mortals are lifted up to
his celestial plane. He is still the God-Man; but he is one among many
brethren who are also God-Men.
Moreover, Jesus is one of a grand order of Saviours. Every world has
its distinctive Saviour, and every dispensation its Christ.
There is a glorious Masonic scheme among the Gods. The everlasting
orders come down to us with their mystic and official names. The
heavens and the earths have a grand leveling; not by pulling down
celestial spheres, but by the lifting up of mortal spheres.
Perchance the skeptic and the strict scientist who measures by the cold
logic of facts, but rises not to the logic of ideas, might not accept
this literal pre-existing view, yet it must be confessed that it is a
lifting up of the idealities of man's origin. Man is the offspring of
the Gods. This is the supreme conception which gives to religion its
very soul. Unless man's divinity comes in somewhere, religion is the
wretchedest humbug that ever deluded mortals.
Priestcraft, indeed, then, from the beginning to the end--from the
Alpha to the Omega of theologic craft, there is nothing divine.
But the sublime and most primitive conception of Mormonism is, that man
in his essential being is divine, that he is the offspring of God--that
God is indeed his Father.
And woman? for she is the theme now.
Woman is heiress of the Gods. She is joint heir with her elder brother,
Jesus the Christ; but she inherits from her God-Father and her
God-Mother. Jesus is the "beloved" of that Father and Mother--their
well-tried Son, chosen to work out the salvation and exaltation of the
whole human family.
And shall it not be said then that the subject _rises_ from the
God-Father to the God-Mother? Surely it is a rising in the sense of
the culmination of the divine idea. The God-Father is not robbed of
his everlasting glory by this maternal completion of himself. It is an
expansion both of deity and humanity.
They twain are one God!
The supreme Unitarian conception is here; the God-Father and the
God-Mother! The grand unity of God is in them--in the divine Fatherhood
and the divine Motherhood--the very beginning and consummation of
creation. Not in the God-Father and the God-Son can the unity of the
heavens and the earths be worked out; neither with any logic of facts
nor of idealities. In them the Masonic trinities; in the everlasting
Fathers and the everlasting Mothers the unities of creations.
Our Mother in heaven is decidedly a new revelation, as beautiful
and delicate to the masculine sense of the race as it is just and
exalting to the feminine. It is the woman's own revelation. Not even
did Jesus proclaim to the world the revelation of our Mother in
heaven--co-existent and co-equal with the eternal Father. This was
left, among the unrevealed truths, to the present age, when it would
seem the woman is destined by Providence to become very much the oracle
of a new and peculiar civilization.
The oracle of this last grand truth of woman's divinity and of her
eternal Mother as the partner with the Father in the creation of
worlds, is none other than the Mormon Church. It was revealed in the
glorious theology of Joseph, and established by Brigham in the vast
patriarchal system which he has made firm as the foundations of the
earth, by proclaiming Adam as our Father and God. The Father is first
in name and order, but the Mother is with him--these twain, one from
the beginning.
Then came our Hebraic poetess with her hymn of invocation, and woman
herself brought the perfected idea of deity into the forms of praise
and worship. Is not this exalting woman to her sphere beyond all
precedent?
Let it be marked that the Roman Catholic idea of the Mother of God is
wonderfully lower than the Mormon idea. The Church of Rome only brings
the maternal conception, linked with deity, in Christ, and that too in
quite the inferior sense. It is not primitive--it is the exception;
it begins and ends with the Virgin Mary. A question indeed whether it
elevates womanhood and motherhood. The ordinary idea is rather the more
exalted; for that always, in a sense, makes the mother superior to the
son. The proverb that great mothers conceive great sons has really more
poetry in it than the Roman Catholic doctrine that Mary was the Mother
of God.
The Mormon Church is the oracle of the grandest conception of womanhood
and motherhood. And from her we have it as a revelation to the world,
and not a mere thought of a transcendental preacher--a glorious
Theodore Parker flashing a celestial ray upon the best intellects of
the age.
Excepting the Lord's prayer, there is not in the English language the
peer of this Mormon invocation; and strange to say the invocation is
this time given to the Church through woman--the prophetess and high
priestess of the faith.