man" who, Paul declared,
should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after
time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and
which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious
dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy
is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the
hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source
divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally
enthusiastic? (1)

(1) See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London,
1897).

Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what
the answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of
self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle
of experience--a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil
and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary
and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the return, the restoration has
to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning
the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to
return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this
'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which
all the expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is
this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and
Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more
glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the
local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation from the
long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and
the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can we doubt that this new
birth--this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so--has
to come, that it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative
theory, but a FACT testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the
past--witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and
unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a
summer night?

Since the first dim evol