CHAP. I. THE MYSTERIES. 31 some new excitement, which it knew not from what quarter to expect. teries. The last hopes of the ancient religion lay in the Mysteries. Of them alone the writers, about The Mys the time of the appearance of Christianity, speak with uniform reverence, if not with awe. They alone could bestow happiness in life, and hope in death." In these remarkable rites P the primitive Nature-worship had survived under a less refined and less humanized form; the original and more simple symbolic forms (those of the first agricultural inhabitants of Greece 1) had been retained by ancient reverence: as its allegory was less intricate and obscure," it accommodated itself better with the advancing spirit of the age. It may indeed be questioned whether the Mysteries did not owe much of their influence to their secrecy, and to the impressive forms under which they shadowed forth their more recondite truths. These, if they did not satisfy, yet kept the mind in a state of progressive and continued 9 Quibus explicatis, ad rationemque revocatis, rerum magis natura cognoscitur, quam deorum. Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 42. • Neque solum cum lætitiâ vivendi | Villoison, P. Knight, Heeren, St. rationem accepimus, sed etiam cum Croix, Creuzer, may be found briefly spe meliore moriendi. Cic. de Leg. stated, Lobeck, i. 6, 8. ii. 14. The theory of Warburton on the Mysteries is now universally exploded; but neither, with the utmost deference to his erudition, can I enter altogether into the views of Lobeck. In my judgment his quotations do not bear him out, as to the publicity of the ceremonies; nor can I conceive that there was none, or scarcely any, secret. Vetabo qui Cereris sacrum Sit trabibus, fragilemque mecum See Varro's View of the Eleusinian Mysteries, preserved by Augustine, De 8 'Αγνωσία σεμνότης ἐπὶ τελετῶν καὶ νύξ· διὰ τοῦτο πιστεύεται τὰ μυστήρια, καὶ ἅβατα σπήλαια διὰ τοῦτο ὀρύττεται, καιροὶ καὶ τόποι κρύπτειν εἰδότες ἀῤῥητουργίαν ἔνOeov. Synes. de Prov. Compare the splendid passage in Dio. Chrys. Orat. 12. X Book 1. excitement. They were, if it may be so said, a great religious drama, in which the initiated were at once spectators and actors; where the fifth act was designedly delayed to the utmost possible point, and of this still suspended catastrophe, the dramatis personæ, the only audience, were kept in studied ignorance. The Mysteries had, perhaps, from an early period associated a moral" purport with their sacred shows; and with the progress of opinion, the moral would more and more predominate over the primitive religious meaning. Yet the morality of the Mysteries was apparently that of the ancient Nature-worship of the East. It taught the immortality of the soul as a part of that vast system of nature, which, emanating from the Supreme Being, passed through a long course of deterioration or refinement, and at length returned and resolved itself into the primal source of all existence. But the Mysteries, from their very nature, could only act upon the public mind in a limited manner: directly they ceased to be mysteries they lost their power. Nor can it be doubted, that while Z * Non semel quædam sacra traduntur: Eleusis servat, quod ostendat revisentibus. Rerum natura sacra sua non simul tradit. Initiatos nos credimus: in vestibulo ejus hæremus. Sen. Nat. Quæst. vii. 31. Ut opinionem suspendio cognitionis ædificent, atque ita tantam majestatem adhibere videantur, quantum præstruxerunt cupiditatem. Tert, adv. Valent. c. 1. Pindar, Frag. 116. Sophocles. Fragm. Luc. LVIII. Isoc. Pan. VII. Plato, Men. * Even Lobeck allows this of the Eleusinian Mysteries-Sacerdotes interdum aliquid de metempsychosi lixisse largiar. i, 73. The Jews were forbidden to be initiated in the Mysteries. In the Greek text of the LXX., a text was interpolated or mistranslated (Deut. xxiii. 17), in which Moses, by an anachronism not uncommon in the Alexandrian school, was made distinctly to condemn these peculiar rites of paganism. z Philo demands why, if they are so useful, they are not public: "Nature makes all her most beautiful and splendid works, her heaven and all her stars, for the sight of all; her seas, fountains, and rivers, the annual temperature of the air, and the winds, the innumerable tribes and races of CHAP. I. PHILOSOPHY A SUBSTITUTE FOR RELIGION. 33 the local and public Mysteries, particularly the greatest of all, the Eleusinian, were pure and undefiled by licentiousness, and, if they retained any of the obscene symbols, disguised or kept them in the back ground; the private and moveable mysteries, which, under the conduct of vagabond priests, were continually flowing in from the East, displayed those symbols in unblushing nakedness, and gave occasion for the utmost licence and impurity." II. Philosophy as a substitute for religion was stil. more manifestly deficient. For, in the first Philosophy. place, it was unable, or condescended not, to b reach the body of the people, whom the progress of civilisation was slowly bringing up towards the common level; and where it found or sought proselytes, it spoke without authority, and distracted with the multitude of its conflicting sects the patient but bewildered inquirer. Philosophy maintained the aristocratic tone, which, while it declared that to a few elect spirits alone it was possible to communicate the highest secrets of knowledge, more particularly the mystery of the great Supreme Being, proclaimed it vain and unwise to attempt to elevate the many to such exalted speculations. "The Father of animals, and fruits of the earth, for | yeλμáтwv; Max. Tyr. xxxv. sub fin. the common use of man-why then are the Mysteries confined to a few, and those not always the most wise and most virtuous?" This is the general sense of a long passage, vol. ii. p. 260. Ed. Mangey. The republic severely prohibited these practices, which were unknown in its earlier and better days. Dionys. Hal. ii. viii. Ορᾷς τὸ πλῆθος τῶν συνθήματων; πῆ τις τράπηται; ποῖον αὐτῶν κατελέξομεν ; τίνι πεισθῶ τῶν παραγ· VOL. I. Neander has likewise quoted several of the same authorities adduced in the following passage. See the translation of Neander, which had not been announced when the above was written. It is curious that Strabo remarks, on another point, the similarity of the Indian opinions to Pla tonism, and treats them all as uúloι :— Παραπλέκουσι δὲ καὶ μύθους, ὥσπερ καὶ Πλάτων, περί τε ἀφθαρσίας ψυχῆς, καὶ τῶν καθ ̓ ᾅδου κρίσεων καὶ ἄλλα τοιαῦτα. L. V. F. 713. D 34 PHILOSOPHIC SYSTEMS. BOOK L the worlds," says Plato in this tone, "it is difficult to discover, and, when discovered, it is impossible to make him known to all." So, observes a German historian of Christianity, think the Brahmins of India. Plato might aspire to the creation of an imaginary republic, which, if it could possibly be realised, might stand alone, an unapproachable model of the physical and moral perfection of man; but the amelioration of the whole world, the simultaneous elevation of all nations, orders, and classes to a higher degree of moral advancement, would have been a vision from which even his imagination would have shrunk in despair. This remained to be conceived and accomplished by one who appeared to the mass of mankind in his own age, as a peasant of Palestine. philosophic systems. It cannot be denied that, to those whom it deigned Varieties of to address, philosophy was sufficiently accommodating; and whatever the bias of the individual mind, the school was open, and the teacher at hand, to lead the inquirer, either to the luxurious gardens of Epicurus, or among the loftier spirits of the Porch. In the two prevalent systems of philosophy, the Epicurean and the Stoic, appears a striking assimilation to the national character of the two predominant races which constituted the larger part of the Roman world. The Epicurean, with its subtle metaphysics, iam accordant its abstract notion of the Deity, its imaginative character; materialism, its milder and more pleasurable morals, and perhaps its propensity to degenerate into indolence and sensuality, was kindred and congenial to that of Greece, and the Grecian part of the Roman Stoicism to society. The Stoic, with its more practical character, its mental strength and self-confidence, its fatalism, its universally diffused and all Epicurean to Greek Roman, CHAP. 1. ACADEMICS. 35 governing Deity, the soul of the universe (of which the political power of the all-ruling republic might appear an image), bore the same analogy to that of Rome. While the more profound thinkers, who could not disguise from themselves the insufficiency of the grounds on which the philosophical systems rested, either settled into a calm and contented scepticism, Academics. or, with the Academics, formed an eclectic creed from what appeared the better parts of the rest. d Such on all the great questions of religion, the divine nature, providence, the origin and future being of the soul, was the floating and uncertain state of the human mind. In the department of morals, Philosophy nobly performed her part; but perhaps her success in this respect more clearly displayed her inefficiency. The height to which moral science was carried in the works of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Antoninus, while it made the breach still wider between the popular religion and the advanced state of the human mind, more vividly displayed the want of a faith, which would associate itself with the purest and loftiest morality; and remarry, as it were, those thoughts and feelings which connect man with a future state of being, to the practical duties of life. d Augustine, speaking of the great | question of the immortality of the work of Varro, concludes thus:-In soul. There is a striking passage in hac totâ serie pulcherrimæ et sub- a writer whose works have lately tilissimæ disputationis, vitam æternam come to light through the industry frustra quæri et sperari, facillime of Angelo Mai. The author is endeaapparet. Civ. Dei, vi. 3. vouring to find consolation for the loss of a favourite grandson: Si maximè esse animas immortales constet, erit • Gibbon and many other writers (Law, Theory of Religion, 127, 130; Sumner, Evidences, p. 76) have ad-hoc philosophis disserendi argumen duced the well-known passages from Sallust and Cicero, which indicate the general state of feeling on the great tum, non parentibus desiderandi reme dium. Front. de Nep. Amiss. |