candles

140:3.13“You are the light of the world. A city set upon a hill can­not be hid. Nei­ther do men light a can­dle and put it un­der a bushel, but on a can­dle­stick; and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine be­fore men that they may see your good works and be led to glo­rify your Fa­ther who is in heaven.

87:1.4The sav­ages sat up all night and talked when a mem­ber of the clan died; they feared they too would die if they fell asleep in the vicin­ity of a corpse. Con­ta­gion from the corpse sub­stan­ti­ated the fear of the dead, and all peo­ples, at one time or an­other, have em­ployed elab­o­rate pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies de­signed to cleanse an in­di­vid­ual af­ter con­tact with the dead. The an­cients be­lieved that light must be pro­vided for a corpse; a dead body was never per­mit­ted to re­main in the dark. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, can­dles are still burned in death cham­bers, and men still sit up with the dead. So-called civ­i­lized man has hardly yet com­pletely elim­i­nated the fear of dead bod­ies from his phi­los­o­phy of life.

85:4.4Fire was mixed up with magic in the minds of prim­i­tive fear-rid­den mor­tals. A devo­tee of magic will vividly re­mem­ber one pos­i­tive chance re­sult in the prac­tice of his magic for­mu­las, while he non­cha­lantly for­gets a score of neg­a­tive re­sults, out-and-out fail­ures. Fire rev­er­ence reached its height in Per­sia, where it long per­sisted. Some tribes wor­shiped fire as a de­ity it­self; oth­ers revered it as the flam­ing sym­bol of the pu­ri­fy­ing and purg­ing spirit of their ven­er­ated de­i­ties. Vestal vir­gins were charged with the duty of watch­ing sa­cred fires, and in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury can­dles still burn as a part of the rit­ual of many re­li­gious ser­vices.