repeated a solemn formula at his admission.

By partaking in these rites a man was believed to part with his
former sins, to form a special union with the deity, in whose nature
he was made to partake, and to be started on a career in which he
could not fail to grow morally better. It is easy to see the immense
superiority of this worship to the official rites of the temples. The
great point is that a new principle of religious association is here
introduced. The tie which binds the worshipper to his god and to his
fellow-worshippers is no longer that of blood or of common political
interests, but the higher one of a common spiritual experience. All
Greeks were eligible for initiation at Eleusis. A man was not born
into this circle, but entered it of his own free will and by means of
voluntary effort and self-denial. A community of a higher order thus
makes its appearance in Greek history, in which the limits of race
and of locality are overstepped, and each is connected with the rest,
because all have turned of their own voluntary motion to the same
ideal centre. The analogies between the community formed on the
mysteries and the Christian Church are too obvious to need to be
insisted on. The adversaries of Christianity asserted that in the
mysteries all the truths and the whole morality of that religion were
to be found.

Religion and Philosophy.--But while the mysteries met to some extent
the craving for a closer union with deity, another need which had
long been growing in the Greek mind was to be satisfied in a very
different manner. The Greek religion we have described had very
little to offer in the way of doctrine. There are no sacred books in
it, there is no theology, there is no religious instruction. When the
mind of Greece awoke to intellectual life, and the demand was made
for an explanation of the world, and for a view of the origin of
things which should explain man to himself, the Greek religion was
manifestly little fitted to meet such a demand. But man has
everywhere looked to religion to do him this service, and a religion
which is incapable of rendering it, or which like Buddhism explicitly
refuses to take up the task, stands in a perilous position. If the
shrine has no doctrine enabling man to understand the origin and the
connection of things, he will seek such a doctrine elsewhere, and
religion will have no control over it. Another alternative is that of
Buddhism where in default of such a doctr