The transference of the altar of threshold covenanting, from the persons of the primary pair in the family to the hearthstone or entrance threshold of the home or family doorway, with the accompaniment of fire as a means of giving and sustaining life to those who sat at the common table or altar, in the covenant meal or sacrament of hospitality, brought about the custom of sacramental communion feasts with guests human and divine. And so, also, there came the rites of worship, with the altar of burnt sacrifice or of incense, and the marriage torch, and the doorway fire, and the threshold or hearthstone covenant at a wedding. Out of this thought there came gradually and naturally the prominence of the altar and the altar fire in private and public worship, as it obtains both in the simpler and in the more gorgeous ecclesiastical rituals.[600]
In conjunction with the place of fire on the family altar in the Threshold Covenant, there came naturally the recognition of fire and warmth and light as gifts of God for the promotion and preservation of life to those who were dependent on him. Thus the sun as the life-giving fire of the universe came to be recognized as a manifestation of God’s power and love. Its agency in bringing new life after death, in the course of the changing seasons, led men to connect the movements of the heavenly bodies with God’s dealings with man in the line of his covenant love. The too common mistake has been of thinking of this view of celestial nature as the origin of man’s religious rites, instead of as an outgrowth of the primal religious rite, which antedated man’s study of, or wonder over, the workings of the elements and the course of the heavenly bodies.
In summing up the results of such a study as this, of primitive customs and their outgrowth, it is necessary only to suggest a few of the more prominent lines of progress from the elemental beginning, leaving it to the student and thinker to follow out these, and to find others, in his more careful and further consideration of the subject in its varied ramifications. It is sufficient now to affirm that the Old Testament and the New point to this primitive rite of the Threshold Covenant as a basis of their common religious ritual; and that gleams of the same germinal idea show themselves in the best features of all the sacred books of the ages. It would be easy, did time and space allow, to follow out in detail the indications that all modes of worship in sacrifice, in oblation, in praise, and prayer, in act and in word, are but natural expressions of desire for covenant union with Deity, and of joy in the thought of its possession, as based on the fact of such covenanting sought and found in the primal religious rite of the human race.