d nations. She was
worshipped fairly widely in Greece and Asia Minor, but
principally in Rome, where a beautiful circular temple was
dedicated to her service; her ministers, the Vestal virgins, were
held in the greatest honour and were chosen from among the
loveliest and noblest of Roman maidens. In this temple was
kept ever brightly burning the sacred fire supposed to have been
kindled by the rays of the sun, and to have been brought by
AEneas when he founded his kingdom in the new land of Italy.
The extinction of this fire would have been regarded as the
gravest public calamity, foreboding disaster. Its flames were
intended to represent the _purity_ of the goddess, thus
emphasising the mystic aspect of another physical property of
fire--its purifying power. "Our God" (said the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews) "is a consuming fire."

Greece had its common hearth at Delphi. It was also supposed
that at the centre of the earth there was a hearth which answered
to that. In the Apocalypse we read of the altar with its sacred
fire as central in heaven. Truly these concepts are persistent!
And why? Because there is more than imagination in them; they
are the products of ideas immanent in the material phenomena
in which they are embodied, and through which they manifest
themselves to the human soul.

There could not fail to be fire-gods many, and a study of their
respective characters, especially in the earlier stages of their
development, often furnishes a key to the intuitional workings
of the primitive mind as prompted by the always arresting, and
often terrorising phenomena of fire and flame. Max Mueller's
detailed study of the development of the Hindu god, Agni, was
mentioned in an earlier chapter. The name originally means the
Mover, and arose, doubtless, from the running, darting, leaping
movement of flame. Beginning his career as a purely physical
god, he advanced through various stages of spiritualisation until
he became the supreme deity. Is not the problem of motion
still one of the most fascinating and profound? Bergson's
"L'Evolution creatrice" is one of the latest attempts to grapple
with it, and those who in early India personified fire as the
Mover were his legitimate predecessors.

The Greek Hephaestus personified the brightness of flame, and
took shape as a god of ripe age, of muscular form, of serious
countenance, but lame. Why lame? Why this physical defect
as a drawback to so much physical bea