the resolutions of the majority upon the deepest subjects of human speculation to the factitious rank of laws which must be accepted on pain of forfeiture, banishment or death.

Philosophy branched off from theology. It became its handmaid and its rival. It postulated doctrines instead of investigating them. It had to show their reasonableness or to find reasons for them. And for ages afterwards philosophy was dead. I feel as strongly as you can feel the weariness of the discussions to which I have tried to direct your attention. But it is only by seeing how minute and how purely speculative they are, that we can properly estimate their place in Christian theology. Whether we do or do not accept the conclusions in which the greater part of the Christian world ultimately acquiesced, we must at least recognize that they rest upon large assumptions. Three may be indicated which are all due to the influence of Greek philosophy.1

1 [As this summing up never underwent the author's final revision, and the notes which follow stand in his MS. parallel with the corresponding portion of the Lecture as originally delivered, it has been thought well to place them here.—ED.]

(1) The tendency to abstract has combined with the tendency to regard matter as evil or impure, in the production of a tendency to form rather a negative than a positive conception of God. The majority of formularies define God by negative terms, and yet they have claimed for conceptions which are negative a positive value.

(2) We owe to Greek philosophy-to the hypothesis of the chasm between spirit and matter-the tendency to interpose powers between the Creator and His creation. It may be held that the attempt to solve the insoluble problem, how God, who is pure spirit, made and sustains us, has darkened the relations which it has attempted to explain by introducing abstract metaphysical conceptions.

(1) It is assumed that metaphysical distinctions are important.

I am far from saying that they are not: but it is not less important to recognize that much of what we believe rests upon this assumption that they are. There is otherwise no justification whatever for drawing men's thoughts away from the positive knowledge which we may gain both of ourselves and of the world around us, to contemplate, even at far distance, the conception of Essence.

(2) The second is the assumption that these metaphysical distinctions which we make in our minds correspond to realities in the world around us, or in God who is beyond the world and within it.

Again, I am far from saying that they do not; but it is at least important for us to recognize the fact that, in speaking of the essence of either the world or God, we are assuming the existence of something corresponding to our conception of essence in the one or the other.1

(3) The third assumption is that the idea of perfection which we transfer from ourselves to God, really corresponds to the nature of His being.

It is assumed that rest is better than motion, that passionlessness is better than feeling, that changelessness is better than change. We know these things of ourselves: we cannot know them of One who is unlike ourselves, who has no body that can be tired, who has no

1 It may be noted that even in the later Greek philosophy there was a view, apparently identical with that of Bishop Berkeley, that matter or substance merely represented the sum of the qualities. Origen, de Princ. 4. 1. 34.

imperfection that can miss its aim, with whom unhindered movement may conceivably be perfect life.

I have spoken of these assumptions because, although it would be difficult to over-estimate the importance of the conceptions by which Greek thought lifted men from the conception of God as a Being with human form and human passions, to the lofty height on which they can feel around them an awful and infinite Presence, the time may have come when-in face of the large knowledge of His ways which has come to us through both thought and research-we may be destined to transcend the assumptions of Greek speculation by new assumptions, which will lead us at once to a diviner knowledge and the sense of a diviner life.1

1 These Lectures are the history of a genesis: it would otherwise have been interesting to show in how many points theories which have been thought out in modern times revive theories of the remote past of Christian antiquity.

LECTURE X.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES UPON

CHRISTIAN USAGES.

A. THE GREEK MYSTERIES AND RELATED CULTS.

SIDE by side in Greece with the religion which was openly professed and with the religious rites which were practised in the temples, not in antagonism to them, but intensifying their better elements and elaborating their ritual, were the splendid rites which were known as the Mysteries. Side by side also with the great political communities, and sheltered within them by the common law and drawn together by a stronger than political brotherhood, were innumerable associations for the practice of the new forms of worship which came in with foreign commerce, and for the expression in a common worship of the religious feelings which the public religion did not satisfy. These associations were known as diɑooi, ἔρανοι οι ὀργεῶνες.

I will speak first of the mysteries, and then of the associations for the practice of other cults.

1. The mysteries were probably the survival of the oldest religions of the Greek races and of the races which preceded them. They were the worship not of the gods

of the sky, Zeus and Apollo and Athene, but of the gods of the earth and the under-world, the gods of the productive forces of nature and of death.1

The most important of them were celebrated at Eleusis, near Athens, and the scattered information which exists about them has been made more impressive and more intelligible to us by excavations, which have brought to light large remains of the great temple-the largest in Greece-in which they were celebrated. It had been a cult common to the Ionian tribes, probably borrowed from the earlier races among whom they had settled. It was originally the cult of the powers which produce the harvest, conceived as a triad of divinities—a god and two goddesses, Pluto, Demeter and Koré, of whom the latter became so dominant in the worship, that the god almost disappeared from view, and was replaced by a divinity, Iacchus, who had no place in the original myth.2 Its chief elements were the initiation, the sacrifice, and the scenic representation of the great facts of natural life and human life, of which the histories of the gods were themselves symbols.3

1 For what follows, reference in general may be made to Keil, Attische Culte aus Inschriften, Philologus, Bd. xxiii. 212-259, 592622 and Weingarten, Histor. Zeitschrift, Bd. xlv. 1881, p. 441 sqq., as well as to the authorities cited in the notes.

2 Foucart, Le culte de Pluton dans la religion éleusinienne, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, 1883, pp. 401 sqq.

8 The successive stages or acts of initiation are variously described and enumerated, but there were at least four: ká@aporis-the preparatory purification ; σύστασις—the initiatory rites and sacrifices; τελετὴ or μύησις—the prior initiation; and ἐποπτεία, the higher or greater initiation, which admitted to the rapádoσis tŵv iepŵv, or holiest act of the ritual. Cf. Lobeck, Aglaoph. pp. 39 ff.