The yard of an Abyssinian church has been compared to “the _lucus_ or sacred grove of the pagan temple.” “The church itself is square, and built of stone with beams stuck in to support them. At the porch, the wooden lintels, which the pious kiss with intense earnestness,–in fact, kissing the walls and lintels of a church is a great feature in Abyssinian devotion, so much so that, instead of speaking of ‘going to church,’ they say ‘kissing the church,’–are carved with quaint and elaborate devices.”[384] At Yeha, near Aksum, are the remains of a ruined temple, within the area of which a church was at one time built. “In front of the vestibule stood two rude monoliths, at the base of one of which is an altar with a circular disk on it, presumably, from the analogy of those at Aksum, for receiving the blood of slaughtered victims.” Obviously, the altar of this temple was at its threshold. Marriages are said to be celebrated in Abyssinia at the church door–the wedding covenant being thus made before the threshold altar.[385] And so in the earlier temples of Egypt, of Carthage, and of Abyssinia, and in Christian and Muhammadan places of worship, the doorway is held sacred, and, most of all, the threshold, or “floor of the door.” 5. TEMPLE THRESHOLDS IN EUROPE. Traces of the primitive sacredness of the doorway and the threshold, in places of worship, are to be found in Europe, ancient and modern, as in Asia and Africa. The term “threshold” occurs in such prominence in connection with temples, in the earliest Greek literature, as to show that its primitive meaning included the idea of altar, or of sanctuary foundation. Thus the House of Zeus on Olympus is repeatedly spoken of as the “House of the Bronze Threshold.”[386] In these references, “the nature of the occurrences, the uniformity of the phrase, the position of the words in the verse, all point to this as an old hieratic phrase, and the meaning evidently is, ‘the house that is stablished forever.’”[387] This term “bronze threshold” occurs more than once in reference to the temple-palace of Alcinoüs.[388] Tartarus is described as having gates of iron and a “bronze threshold.”[389] Night and day meet as they cross the “great threshold of bronze;” and Atlas upholds heaven at the threshold of the under-world.[390] The treasures of Delphi are described as “within the stone threshold of the archer god, Phoebus Apollo, in Rocky Pytho.”[391] And he who seeks counsel at that oracle is spoken of as one who crosses “the stone threshold.”[392] In Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” the Athenian warns the stranger Oedipus that he is on holy ground, in the realm of Poseidon, and that the spot where he now treads is “called the brazen threshold of the land, the stay of Athens.”[393] In other words, the bronze threshold is an archaic synonym for the enduring border, or outer limit, of spiritual domain.