Reverence for the phallus, or for phallic emblems, shows itself in the earliest historic remains of Babylonia, Assyria, India, China, Japan, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Abyssinia, Greece, Rome, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Spain, Great Britain, North and South America, and the Islands of the Sea. It were needless to attempt detailed proof of this statement, in view of all that has been written on the subject by historians, archæologists, and students of comparative religions.[605] It is enough to suggest that the mistake has too often been made of supposing that this “phallic worship” was a primitive conception of a religious truth, instead of a perversion of the earlier and purer idea which is at the basis of the highest religious conceptions, from the beginning until now. Quite as widely extended, in both time and space, as the worship of the phallus as the symbol of masculine potency, is the recognition of the tree of life as the symbol of feminine nature in its fruit-bearing capacity. A single tree, or a grove of trees, or the lotus flower, the fig, or the pomegranate, with the peculiar form of their seed capsules, appear in all the earlier religious symbolisms, over against the phallus in its realistic or its conventional forms, as representative of reproductive life.[606] In ancient Assyrian sculpture the most familiar representation of spiritual blessing was of a winged deity with a basket and a palm cone, touching with the cone a sacred tree, or again the person of a sovereign, as if imparting thereby some special benefit or power. This representation was long a mystery to the archeologist, but a recent scholar has shown that it is an illustration of a practice common in the East to-day, of carrying a cone of the male palm to a female palm tree, in order to vitalize it by the pollen.[607] The cone is one of the conventional forms of the phallus, worshiped as a symbol in the temples of the goddesses of the East in earlier days and later.[608] Hence this ancient Assyrian representation is an illustration of the truth that the primitive threshold covenant was recognized as the type of divine power, and covenant blessing, imparted to God’s representative, under the figure of the phallus and the tree. It would seem, indeed, that the pillar and the tree came to be the conventional symbols of the male and female elements erected in front of an altar of worship,[609] and that, in the deterioration of the ages, these symbols themselves were worshiped, and their symbolism was an incentive to varied forms of impurity, instead of to holy covenanting with God and in God’s service. Therefore these symbols were deemed by true worshipers a perversion of an originally sacred rite, and their destruction was a duty with those who would restore God’s worship to its pristine purity.