14 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was a domestic rite. Each home had its altar and its sacred fire, 

 whose flame must never be allowed to go out. And so the word 

 hestia or vesta — the fixed place for the family hearth-fire — came to 

 represent the divine mother, the guardian of the family, who, if duly 

 honored, would preserve it in honor and prosperity. It was the ofiice 

 of the father or grandfather, the living head of the family, to pour on 

 the sacred flame the offerings of meal and butter, to offer the incense 

 and pour out the libations, and to salute with prayer and praise the 

 beneficent god of light, at his morning rising ; or when, by neglect 

 properly to feed the deity of the hearth, the god had left them, it was 

 the duty of the father to bring him back, by the friction of the sacred 

 sticks. 



As families increased to tribes, and tribes were consolidated, the 

 chief of the tribe, the patriarch of the community became, of course, 

 the proper officer to perform the religious rites for the greater social 

 body ; as was the case in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, 

 and is still the case in China to-day. The gods were conceived of 

 as belonging to and concerned only with the tribe or nation that wor- 

 shiped them ; often, indeed, were imagined inseparable from a particu- 

 lar land ; and he who went away from it was beyond the protection of 

 his accustomed gods. 



Thus David, in his well-known appeal (1 Samuel, xxvi, 19), says to 

 Saul, If men have stirred thee up against me, they are cursed, for 

 they have driven me out this day from dwelling in Jehovah's heritage, 

 saying to me, Go, serve other gods. The idea that all lands might 

 be under the care of one god, and the people of different nations 

 might be of one religion, was a conception slow in arising. Who- 

 ever belonged to a tribe or nation was bound to worship the gods 

 of that nation. When a man was adopted into a nation, or a woman 

 married into another gens or tribe, such a person was held to adopt 

 the divinities and tutelar deities of their new companions also. The 

 promise of Ruth to Naomi, "Thy people shall be my people, and 

 thy God my God," was not an exceptional but a necessary conjunc- 

 tion. To disown or ignore the gods of one's fathers was to disown 

 one's nationality. 



Conversely, the god of a special people rmist protect and favor his 

 own. In the historical books of the Old Testament, e. g., we see many 

 times appearing the idea that Jehovah's honor is so bound up with that 

 of his people that he could not neglect to protect and bless them, no 

 matter how great his wrath against their trespasses. The existence 

 of foreign gods was not at all disbelieved, nor their power denied. But 

 they were looked upon as naturally confining their favors to their own 

 land and people. It was proper that their own people should worship 

 them, but to foreigners they would be indifferent or hostile. To in- 

 troduce strange gods into the state was therefore a dangerous experi- 

 ment, entailing the risk of alienating their rightful divine protectors. 



