Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/44

 38 ANCIENT BELIEFS. BOOK I. sacred food ; but at the same time it thinks, and has a conscience ; it knows men's duties, and sees that they are fulfilled. One might call it human, for it has the double nature of man ; physically, it blazes up, it moves, it lives, it procures abundance, it prepares the repast, it nourishes the body; morally, it has sentiments and affections, it gives man purity, it enjoins the beautiful and the good, it nourishes the soul. One might say that it supports human life in the double series of its manifestations. It is at the same time the source of wealth, of health, of virtue. It is truly the god of human nature. Later, when this worship had been assigned to a second place by Crahma or by Zeus, there still remained in the hearth-fire whatever of divine was most accessible to man. It became his mediator with the gods of physical nature; it undertook to carry to heaven the prayer and the offering of man, and to bring the divine favors back to him. Still later, when they made the great Vesta of this myth of the sacred fire, Vesta was the virgin goddess. She represented in the world neither iecundity nor power; she was order, but not rigorous, abstract, mathematical order, th<^ im- perious and unchangeable law, dKi-/;*;/, which was early perceived in physical nature. She was moral order. They imagined her as a sort of universal soul, which regulated the different movements of worlds, as the human soul keeps order in the human system. Thus are we permitted to lock into the way of thinking of primitive generations. The principle of this worship is outside of physical nature, and is found in this little mysterious world, this microcosm — man. This brings us back to the worship of the dead. Both are of the same antiquity. They were so closely associated that the belief of the ancients made but one