Excerpt: The Women of Mormondom (Eliza R. Snow's Invocation - The Eternal Father and Mother)

The Women of Mormondom - 1877

By Edward W. Tullidge (1829-1894)

Long enough, O women of America, have your Mormon sisters been blasphemed! From the day that they, in the name and fear of the Lord their God, undertook to "build up Zion," they have been persecuted for righteousness sake: "A people scattered and peeled from the beginning." The record of their lives is now sent unto you, that you may have an opportunity to judge them in the spirit of righteousness. So shall you be judged by Him whom they have honored, whose glory they have sought, and whose name they have magnified.

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.

Eliza R. Snow

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.

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