Sometimes it is claimed that gloves became a symbol in the Church long before kings singled them out to embody a monarch’s good faith or the royal consent. Of course kings wore gloves before the Christian Church came into being. But, as we have seen, the ancients seem to have attached less allegorical significance to gloves and to have regarded them more as a personal luxury. In the Orient, however, as the Bible shows, challenge by the glove was a recognized institution. Also, in the sales of lands, the purchaser was given a glove to symbolize delivery or investiture—of which the passage from Ruth which heads the previous chapter is, probably, the most famous instance. From the Oriental custom Mediæval Europe derived the challenge, so picturesquely employed in history and in literature. A certain charter of the thirteenth century also names a case of re-investiture, or restitution of property, symbolically expressed by the person restoring the lands casting his glove upon the ground. If the Greeks and the Romans were somewhat literal and coldly materialistic in their attitude toward gloves, it remained for mediæval Europe to raise them to a cult. In the Middle Ages men had a passion for glorifying the common utensils of life. Whether it was the clergy or royalty which first seized upon gloves to exalt them into the realm of the mysterious, causing them to be scarcely less revered than the king’s or the bishop’s own person, it would be difficult to say. But, as the gloves bestowed upon the kings of olden France at their coronations were blessed and presented by the archbishop of the realm—who, in this act, was simply following the ancient Eastern practice of performing investiture—it would appear that gloves were granted by the Church to the thrones; and that thus the monarch received this sign of his sovereignty as the gracious gift of the Spiritual Power, which enjoyed precedence in honoring the glove. Certainly gloves were a mark of religious dignity at an extremely early period, and played a distinctive part in the rites and services of the ancient Church. Officiating priests invariably consecrated the Holy Sacrament with gloves on their hands. This custom still obtains in the Church of England. Moreover, the laity always drew off their gloves within the sacred portals, where it was sacrilege to cover worldly hands even as the Fathers covered theirs.