Forlong - Rivers of Life

342
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
describing the present “Tenebræ” Service at the Pro-Cathedral, Kensington, he says:
“Twelve lighted tapers are arranged on a stand, six on each side of a central one, also
burning. These twelve tapers are one by one extinguished, while the choir chant
appropriate psalms, and are supposed to represent the disciples who ‘all forsook him
and fled.’ The central taper represents ‘The Light of the World’ himself, and
finally this is extinguished, typifying the darkness of His Passion.”
At the Easter or Spring festival, the Romish churches in Britain have numerous
fire and phallic ceremonies, not excepting, says this same author, the kindling of “NEW
FIRE” from flint and steel, which he saw performed on Holy Saturday, and with
which fire all the lamps of the church were lighted (p. 412). Thus we need not
wonder at the hold speech made by Bishop Strossmayerl which so startled unread
Europe a few years ago. This Bishop asserted before all the great Ecumenical Council
of seven hundred Prelates assembled at the Vatican, that one reason he saw against
decreeing infallibility to Popes was, that Marcellinus, who was Pope from 296 to 303
A.C., “was neither more nor less than an idolater, having entered inro the temple of
Vesta, and offered incense to the goddess.” Now, what was this Temple of Vesta?
In its rites and surroundings, its duties social and political, it was one with the temples
still existing in Asia, devoted to Phallic and Fire-worship combined, or perhaps I
should say a temple to Phallic worship only, but the cult in the dawn of brighter faiths
was somewhat hid away by the priests in the darkest recesses of their temples and
not well-known by many of the worshippers and scarcely at all by European writers
even of the middle ages. Any student of Delphic lore and of Eastern travel, however,
will recognise at once in Delphi’s oracle and Vesta’s temple, “The old Faith” and its
priestess worshippers, although the writer in Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities does not
appear to do so. He describes Vesta’s as merely a Fire-temple, and says that there were
six Vestales or Virgin Priestesses to watch the eternal Fire which blazed everlastingly
on the altar of the goddess. On the Pope has descended the name of their superior as
“Pontifex Maximus.” If by any negligence or misfortune the Fire went out the Pontifex
Maximus stripped and scourged
the erring vestal virgin, for had not
she—a woman—permitted the procreative
energy of the god to forsake
mankind? Procreative man and
woman stood represented in the in-
Fig. 151.—TEMPLE OF VESTA, AND THE IDEA, WITH FIRE AND SERPENT ALTAR,
ALSO AN ORDINARY LINGA-IN-ARGHA, AND THE RING OF A PIOUS SIVAITE.
nermost adytum of that temple, where
none were permitted to enter save the
virgins, for in it all agreed in believing there was something of awful sanctity.
“Some said in it were the sacred relics which formed (and no doubt truly)
the fatal Pignus Imperii—the pledge granted by fate for the permanency