there was an interval of two days before the more solemn sacrifices and shows began. They began with a great procession—each of those who, were to be initiated carrying a long lighted torch, and singing loud pœans in honour of the god.1 It set out from Athens at sunrise and reached Eleusis at night. The next day there was another great sacrifice. Then followed three days and nights in which the initiated shared the mourning of Demeter for her daughter, and broke their fast only by drinking the mystic KUKEV-a drink of flour and water and pounded mint, and by eating the sacred cakes.2

(iii.) And at night there were the mystic plays: the scenic representation, the drama in symbol and for sight. Their torches were extinguished: they stood outside the temple in the silence and the darkness. The doors opened—there was a blaze of light-and before them was acted the drama of Demeter and Koré-the loss of the daughter, the wanderings of the mother, the birth of the child. It was a symbol of the earth passing through its yearly periods. It was the poetry of Nature. It was the drama which is acted every year, of summer and winter and spring. Winter by winter the fruits and flowers and grain die down into the darkness, and spring after spring they come forth again to new life. Winter after winter the sorrowing earth is seeking for

1 Cf. Clem. Alex. Protrept. 12: "O truly sacred mysteries! 0 stainless light! My way is lighted with torches and I survey the heavens and God: I am become holy whilst I am initiated. The Lord is the hierophant, and seals while illuminating him who is initiated," &c. Ib. 2: "Their (Demeter's and Proserpine's) wanderings, and seizure, and grief, Eleusis celebrates by torchlight processions;" and again p. 32. So Ælius Aristid. i. p. 454 (ed. Canter), ràs pwoþópovs vúktas.

2 "I have fasted, I have drunk the cup," &c. Clem. Alex. Protrept. 2.

her lost child; the hopes of men look forward to the new blossoming of spring.

It was a drama also of human life. It was the poetry of the hope of a world to come. Death gave place to life. It was a purgatio animæ, by which the soul might be fit for the presence of God. Those who had been baptized and initiated were lifted into a new life. Death had no terrors for them. The blaze of light after darkness, the symbolic scenery of the life of the gods, were a foreshadowing of the life to come.1

There is a passage in Plutarch which so clearly shows this, that I will quote it.2

"When a man dies, he is like those who are being initiated into the mysteries. The one expression, reλEUTây-the other, Teλeiola, correspond. . . . Our whole life is but a succession of wanderings, of painful courses, of long journeys by tortuous. ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it, fears, terrors, quiverings, mortal sweats, and a lethargic stupor, come over us and overwhelm us; but as soon as we are out of it, pure spots and meadows receive us, with voices and dances and the solemnities of sacred words and holy sights. It is there that man, having become perfect and initiated-restored to liberty, really master of himself-celebrates, crowned with myrtle, the most august mysteries, holds converse with just and pure souls, looking down upon the impure multitude of the profane or uninitiated, sinking in the mire and mist beneath him-through fear of death and through disbelief in the life to come, abiding in its miseries."

There was probably no dogmatic teaching-there were possibly no words spoken-it was all an acted

1 Cf. Ælius Aristid. i. 454, on the burning of the temple at Eleusis. The gain of the festival was not for this life only, but that hereafter they would not lie in darkness and mire like the uninitiated.

2 Fragm. ap. Stob. Florileg. 120. Lenormant, Cont. Rev. Sept. 1880, p. 430.

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parable. But it was all kept in silence. There was an awful individuality about it. They saw the sight in common, but they saw it each man for himself. It was his personal communion with the divine life. The glamour and the glory of it were gone when it was published to all the world.2 The effect of it was conceived to be a change both of character and of relation to the gods. The initiated were by virtue of their initiation made partakers of a life to come. "Thrice happy they who go to the world below having seen these mysteries: to them alone is life there, to all others is misery."3

2. In time, however, new myths and new forms of worship were added. It is not easy to draw a definite line between the mysteries, strictly so called, and the forms of worship which went on side by side with them. Not only are they sometimes spoken of in common as mysteries, but there is a remarkable syncretist painting in a non-Christian catacomb at Rome, in which the elements of the Greek mysteries of Demeter are blended with those of Sabazius and Mithra, in a way which shows that the worship was blended also.* These forms of worship

1 Synes. Orat. p. 48 (ed. Petav.), oỷ μaßeîv tɩ deîv ådλà ñabeîv kai τι παθεῖν διατεθῆναι γενομένους δηλονότι ἐπιτηδείους. But the μυσταγωγοὶ possibly gave some private instruction to the groups of μúoral who were committed to them.

2 Cf. Lenormant, Cont. Rev. Sept. 1880, p. 414 sq.

3 Soph. frag. 719, ed. Dind. so in effect Pindar, frag. thren. 8; Cic. Legg. 2. 14. 36; Plato, Gorg. p. 493 B, Phado. 69 C (the lot of the uninitiated). They were bound to make their life on earth correspond to their initiation; see Lenormant, ut sup. p. 429 sqq. In later times it was supposed actually to make them better; Sopatros in Walz, Rhet. Gr. viii. 114.

4 See Garrucci, Les Mystères du Syncretisme Phrygien dans les Catacombes Romaines de Prætextat, Paris, 1854.

also had an initiation: they also aimed at a pure religion. The condition of entrance was: "Let no one enter the most venerable assembly of the association unless he be pure and pious and good." Nor was it left to the individual conscience: a man had to be tested and examined by the officers. But the main element in the association was not so much the initiation as the sacrifice and the common meal which followed it. The offerings were brought by individuals and offered in common: they were offered upon what is sometimes spoken of as the "holy table." They were distributed by the servants (the deacons), and the offerer shared with the rest in the distribution. In one association, at Xanthos in Lycia, of which the rules remain on an inscription, the offerer had the right to half of what he had brought. The feast which followed was an effort after real fellowship.2 There was in it, as there is in Christian times, a sense of communion with one another in a communion with God.

During the earliest centuries of Christianity, the mysteries, and the religious societies which were akin to the mysteries,3 existed on an enormous scale throughout the eastern part of the Empire. There were elements in some of them from which Christianity recoiled, and against which the Christian Apologists use the language

1 There was a further and larger process before a man was réλeos. Tert. adv. Valent. c. 1, says that it took five years to become réλeos.

2 The most elaborate account is that of the Arval feast at Rome: cf. Henzen, Acta fratrum Arvalium.

3 μúoraι is used of members of a religious association at Teos (Inscr. in Bullet. de Corresp. Hellénique, 1880, p. 164), and of the Roman Monarchians in Epiph. 55. 8; cf. Harnack, Dogm. 628.

of strong invective.1 But, on the other hand, the majority of them had the same aims as Christianity itself-the aim of worshipping a pure God, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of cultivating the spirit of brotherhood.2 They were part of a great religious revival which distinguishes the age.3

B. THE MYSTERIES AND THE CHURCH.

It was inevitable when a new group of associations came to exist side by side with a large existing body of associations, from which it was continually detaching members, introducing them into its own midst with the practices of their original societies impressed upon their minds, that this new group should tend to assimilate, with the assimilation of their members, some of the elements of these existing groups. This is what we

1 Clem. Alex. Protrep. 2; Hippol. 1, procm. Cf. Philo, de sacrif. 12 (ii. 260), τί γὰρ εἰ καλὰ ταῦτ ̓ ἐστὶν ὦ μύσται κ. τ. λ.

2 They also had the same sanction—the fear of future punishments, cf. Celsus in Orig. 8. 48. Origen does not controvert this statement, but appeals to the greater moral effect of Christianity as an argument for its truth. They possibly also communicated divine knowledge. There is an inscription of Dionysiac artists at Nysa, of the time of the Antonines, in honour of one who was coλóyos of the temples at Pergamos, as θαυμαστὸν θεολόγον and τῶν ἀπορρήτων μύστην. Bull. de Corr. Hellén. 1885, p. 124, 1. 4; cf. Porphyry in Eusebius, Prap. Ev. 5. 14.

3 This revival had many forms, cf. Harnack, Dogm. p. 101.

4 Similar practices existed in the Church and in the new religions which were growing up. Justin Martyr speaks of the way in which, under the inspiration of demons, the supper had been imitated in the Mithraic mysteries: ὅπερ καὶ ἐν τοῖς τοῦ Μίθρα μυστηρίοις παρέδωκαν γίνεσθαι μιμησάμενοι οἱ πονηροὶ δαίμονες : Apol. 1. 66. Tertullian points to the fact as an instance of the power of the devil (de præsc.