ADORATION, in unspecialized modern usage, a spiritual homage to God; but originally an act to express obedience and reverence per formed before the images of the gods. Among the Romans it was performed by raising the hand to the mouth, kissing it, and then waving it in the direction of the image ; the devotee had his head covered except before Saturn and Hercules, and after the act turned himself around from left to right. Sometimes he kissed the feet or knees of the images. This homage was afterward transferred to the emperors, by bowing or kneeling, laying hold of the imperial robe, and then pressing the hand to the lips. The Oriental methods were of course still more abject,— bending the knee, falling on the face, striking the earth with the forehead and kissing the ground or floor. Alexander borrowed this from the Persians and made it a feature of his court; the rough Macedonian Cassander burst Into a roar of laughter when he saw the Persian grandees performing this kotow (the Chinese term for the same act) before Alexander, who was so enraged that he seized him by his long hair and dashed his head against the wall. But the Greeks considered it impious and degrading, and the best of them would not bend to it; Conon refused it to Artaxerxes, and Callis thenes to Alexander. The abject degradations
which the medizval far-Eastern rulers exacted from foreign traders, by submitting to which the Dutch purchased trade privileges, though the English would not,— crawling on the face from the door to the monarch's seat, licking up the dust as they went, till the victim was often unable to speak when he reached it, and could only gasp with his mouth full of dirt,—are well known. Milder forms in modern times, hardly thought degrading even by the sturdiest demo crat, are kneeling and kissing the monarch's hand; and the similar homages of lovers have never been considered so. The ceremony of kissing the cross embroidered on the Pope's slipper is a like form, said to have been bor rowed from a similar ceremony introduced by the Emperor Diocletian, who greatly extended court ceremonial. The original signification of the word as an act and not an emotion is preserved in the marriage service of the English and Protestant Episcopal Churches, "with my body I thee worship.° In the Roman Catholic Church, also, a distinction is made between labia, the worship due to God alone, and dulia the veneration paid to the Saints, and hyper dulia, that accorded to the Virgin.