altars

98:6.3Dur­ing the third cen­tury af­ter Christ, Mith­raic and Chris­tian churches were very sim­i­lar both in ap­pear­ance and in the char­ac­ter of their rit­ual. A ma­jor­ity of such places of wor­ship were un­der­ground, and both con­tained al­tars whose back­grounds var­i­ously de­picted the suf­fer­ings of the sav­ior who had brought sal­va­tion to a sin-cursed hu­man race.

94:1.1In the days of Mel­chiz­e­dek, In­dia was a cos­mopoli­tan coun­try which had re­cently come un­der the po­lit­i­cal and re­li­gious dom­i­nance of the Aryan-And­ite in­vaders from the north and west. At this time only the north­ern and west­ern por­tions of the penin­sula had been ex­ten­sively per­me­ated by the Aryans. These Vedic new­com­ers had brought along with them their many tribal de­i­ties. Their re­li­gious forms of wor­ship fol­lowed closely the cer­e­mo­nial prac­tices of their ear­lier And­ite fore­bears in that the fa­ther still func­tioned as a priest and the mother as a priest­ess, and the fam­ily hearth was still uti­lized as an al­tar.

92:2.2Re­li­gion clings to the mores; that which was is an­cient and sup­pos­edly sa­cred. For this rea­son and no other, stone im­ple­ments per­sisted long into the age of bronze and iron. This state­ment is of rec­ord: “And if you will make me an al­tar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone, for, if you use your tools in mak­ing it, you have pol­luted it.” Even to­day, the Hin­dus kin­dle their al­tar fires by us­ing a prim­i­tive fire drill. In the course of evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion, nov­elty has al­ways been re­garded as sac­ri­lege. The sacra­ment must con­sist, not of new and man­u­fac­tured food, but of the most prim­i­tive of viands: “The flesh roasted with fire and un­leav­ened bread served with bit­ter herbs.” All types of so­cial us­age and even le­gal pro­ce­dures cling to the old forms.