In summing up the results of such a study as this, of primitive customs and their outgrowth, it is necessary only to suggest a few of the more prominent lines of progress from the elemental beginning, leaving it to the student and thinker to follow out these, and to find others, in his more careful and further consideration of the subject in its varied ramifications. It is sufficient now to affirm that the Old Testament and the New point to this primitive rite of the Threshold Covenant as a basis of their common religious ritual; and that gleams of the same germinal idea show themselves in the best features of all the sacred books of the ages. It would be easy, did time and space allow, to follow out in detail the indications that all modes of worship in sacrifice, in oblation, in praise, and prayer, in act and in word, are but natural expressions of desire for covenant union with Deity, and of joy in the thought of its possession, as based on the fact of such covenanting sought and found in the primal religious rite of the human race. 3. CHIEF PERVERSIONS. With the world as it is, and with man as he is, every possibility of good has a corresponding possibility of evil. Good perverted becomes evil. Truth which, rightly used, proves a savor of life, will, when misused, prove a savor of death.[601] And that which is a symbol of truth becomes a means of misleading when looked at as if it were in itself the truth. The primitive Threshold Covenant as an elemental religious rite was holy and pure, and had possibilities of outgrowth in the direction of high spiritual attainment and aspiring. But the temptation to uplift the agencies in this rite into objects deemed of themselves worthy of worship resulted in impurity and deterioration, by causing the symbol to hide the truth instead of disclosing it. Among the earliest forms of a temple as a place of worship was the ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, erected as a mighty altar, with its shrine, or holy of holies, at the summit, wherein a bride of the gods awaited the coming of the deity to solemnize the primal Threshold Covenant in expression of his readiness to enter into loving communion with the children of men.[602] From this custom the practice of Threshold Covenanting at the temple doorways became incumbent on women of all conditions of society at certain times, and under certain circumstances, in certain portions of the world, as a proof of their religious devotion,[603] and thus there grew up all the excesses of sacred prostitution in different portions of the world.[604] The prominence given to the two factors in the primitive Threshold Covenant as a sacred religious act, led to the perversion of the original idea by making the factors themselves objects of reverence and worship; and separately, or together, they came to be worshiped with impure and degrading accompaniments.