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Just as the poem says, 'All that man ignores in you, just that you are worth to God! And you can be what He meant you to be. I have been praying all the afternoon that He would help you to be." "Have you?" he said, and his eyes lit up again as if the altar-fires of hope were burning once more. "Have you? I thank you." "You came to me when I was lost in the wilderness," she said, shyly.
"Even the Bible, in its wide comprehension of all classes of man, to include the race of giants, before the flood, the stalwart sons of Anak, and the giant adversary of little David, makes no mention of the little people except in the third book of Mosaic writings, the 'Crookbackt' or dwarfs are warned not to come nigh the altar-fires where sacrifices are offered.
The choice of war or peace, of battle or maneuvering for delay, seemed to the Romans the taking of the advice of the gods, who manifested their injunctions by various signs, by the appearance of the liver, heart, lungs and kidneys of the cattle and sheep sacrificed, by the flight of birds, by the shape of the flames of altar-fires, all regarded as definite answers to explicit questions; who also made suggestions or gave warnings by means of earthquakes, floods, conflagrations, pestilences, eclipses, by the aurora borealis, by any sort of strange happening.
They will chant prayers and burn altar-fires on their mountain sides," Loristan said. "But the end is not yet the end is not yet. Sometimes it seems that perhaps it is near but God knows!" Then there leaped back upon Marco the story he had to tell, but which he had held back for the last the story of the man who spoke Samavian and drove in the carriage with the King.
In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed.
So great and so comprehensive was the change which had been wrought, that she seemed to herself to be a real person who had lately been a shadow; a something which had lately been a nothing; a purpose, which had lately been a fancy; a finished temple, with the altar-fires lit and the voice of worship ascending, where before had been but an architect's confusion of arid working plans, unintelligible to the passing eye and prophesying nothing.
The smoke of thy altar-fires, the steam of thy incense, and the odors of thy sanctity rise from every hypaethral shrine in Rome. Out-doors and in-doors, wherever the foot wanders, on palatial stairs or in the hut of poverty, in the convent pottage and the Lepre soup, in the wooden platter of the beggar and the silver tureen of the prince, thou fillest our nostrils, thou satisfiest our stomach.
It is such an age, dark, confused, shameful, that the sceptic and the scorner must face, when they turn their backs upon those ancient shrines where the flames of faith and integrity and devotion are flickering like the deserted altar-fires of a forsaken worship.
Our sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could not be kept alight A community without crime would be a community without warm and elevated sentiments without the sense of justice, without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil.
And then, suddenly, the shouting ceased, the confusion was quelled, a hush fell upon the multitude, as that single figure in white swept with fluttering draperies across from the rear to the front of the stage, and paused for a moment before she began her invocation to the Grecian goddess: whose altar-fires went out in ancient ages, but who was a living and a glorious reality when the building in which was this echo of her worship came new from the hands of its creators seventeen hundred years ago.
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