who wrote of Cicero
after his own time. Quintilian, speaking of Cicero and Brutus as writers
of philosophy, says of the latter, "Suffecit ponderi rerum; scias enim
sentire quae dicit."[49]--"He was equal to the weight of the subject, for
you feel that he believes what he writes." He leaves the inference, of
course, that Cicero wrote on such matters only for the exercise of his
ingenuity, as a school-boy writes.

When at Athens, Cicero was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries--as
to which Mr. Collins, in his little volume on Cicero, in the Ancient
Classics for English Readers, says that they "contained under this veil
whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an
enlightened pagan." In this Mr. Collins is fully justified by what
Cicero himself has said although the character thus given to these
mysteries is very different from that which was attributed to them by
early Christian writers. They were to those pious but somewhat
prejudiced theologists mysterious and pagan, and therefore horrible.[50]
But Cicero declares in his dialogue with Atticus, De Legibus, written
when he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his intellect, that
"of all the glories and divine gifts which your Athens has produced for
the improvement of men nothing surpasses these mysteries, by which the
harshness of our uncivilized life has been softened, and we have been
lifted up to humanity; and as they are called 'initia,'" by which
aspirants were initiated, "so we have in truth found in them the seeds
of a new life. Nor have we received from them only the means of living
with satisfaction, but also of dying with a better hope as to the
future."[51]

Of what took place with Cicero and Atticus at their introduction to the
Eleusinian mysteries we know nothing. But it can hardly be that, with
such memories running in his mind after thirty years, expressed in such
language to the very friend who had then been his companion, they should
not have been accepted by him as indicating the commencement of some
great line of thought. The two doctrines which seem to mark most clearly
the difference between the men whom we regard, the one as a pagan and
the other as a Christian, are the belief in a future life and the duty
of doing well by our neighbors. Here they are both indicated, the former
in plain language, and the latter in that assurance of the softening of
the barbarity of uncivilized life, "Quibus ex agresti immanique vita