The Greeks met together to worship in their Prytaneia. Here they consulted together for the public good, and there was a constant fire burning on the altar, which was called "vesta." The Vestal Virgins of the Romans had their origin in the same idea. Many of the oldest and some of the most modern usages still to be found among the Parsees, Hindoos, Jews, Greeks, Mohammedans, and Roman Catholics bear reference to this early worship of the "household fire," and many of the problems, puzzles, and contradictions that are found in the religious symbols of the world stand clear and evident when submitted to this light. The word "Light" is used in the New Testament as the highest symbol of Christ--"the Light of the world," "the Light that lighteth every man who cometh into the world." Every instance also of God's acceptance of sacrifice and prayer in the Old Testament is made evident to the people through the medium of fire, as seen in the case of David, in the dedication of Solomon's temple, and when Elijah demanded that extraordinary proof from Jehovah that Baal was not God. From Genesis to the Revelation, from the first offerings of Cain and Abel to "the city that had no need of a sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of the Lord did lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof," this symbol of light is the dearest to the human heart, and ever recurring and conspicuous as the fittest and purest to be applied to the Deity. It is as a symbol, not as a material element, that the worshippers of fire have clung to it through all times; and their adherence and tenacity are all the more remarkable when we consider the changes that have passed over all primitive institutions. We ourselves have had a succession of different religions and gods--the divinities of the Phoenicians, then those of the Greeks and Romans, which superseded the terrible gods of the Norsemen and the aboriginal deities of the Druids, our ancestors. All these in time have given place to the sublime teachings of Christ. Our religious forms are changing even to-day as religious convictions become wider, deeper, and more comprehensive than ever. But the Parsees, those ancient Sun- and Fire-worshippers, still offer up their prayers in the old Pehlevi--a language which is the elder sister of the ancient Sanskrit--in which the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the Zoroastrians, are written, and older by far than the cuneiform inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes;[15] still wear the same old conical cap in the form of ascending flame, preserved in the shape of the bishop's mitre in the Christian symbolic dress; still adhere to the rites, ceremonies, manners, and customs peculiar to their earliest fathers, invoking the invisible fire upon which they called centuries before the building of the temple of Solomon.