"No blessing can be asked or granted from the altar of any Catholic Church until the candles are lighted. If a woman when pregnant desires to be blessed by the Christian Church, she is instructed 'to wait on her knees, at the door of the church, with a lighted taper in her hand,' nor can any cross be blessed until three tapers are lighted by the 'man of God,' had placed at its base. See Picart II., 117, where he gives some graphic plates of Christian Phallo-solar-fire rites. "In Goodwin's _Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites_, under the head of _Feasts of the Expiation_, which we have reason to believe was at one time a period of human sacrifice, we have the great Winter-Christmas Saturnalia, or Juvenalia Festival of Lights and Fires described, when not only the temples of Jews and Christians, but every house had to be carefully lighted. Jews taught that the lights must be held in the left hand, and the holder must 'walk between two commandments,' which seems to denote the climatic or solar turn of the year. This old writer tells us that it was 'woman's peculiar province to light their lamps;' and that 'there are certain prayers appropriated to this festival, and among the rest _one in praise of God, who hath ordained the lighting up of lamps upon Solemn Days_.' Here we see a close resemblance between the faith of the Jew and the Islami, whose wives are enjoined personally to see to the lighting of the household lamps on Venus' Eve. Jerusalem, we know, acknowledges the God of Agni to the present hour, by annually giving out that holy Fire descends from heaven at a stated season into the dark Adyta of the Sacred Shrine; all old fires must be extinguished at this the season of Sol's renewed vigour, so when the priest emerges from the adytum with the new fire in his hand (and Christian priests have often done this, if they do not do so still), crowds of every hue and creed rush towards him, light their tapers, and bear away the new fire to their homes."