le, and admitted by night into a vast temple, where they were purified
and instructed, and assisted at certain grand solemnities. The doctrines
taught are unknown, but are supposed to have been the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul. But this is only conjecture.

Bacchus is believed to have been originally an Indian god, naturalized in
Greece, and his mysteries to be Indian in their character. The genial life
of nature is the essential character of Bacchus. One of the names of the
Indian Siva is Dionichi, which very nearly resembles the Greek name of
Bacchus, Dionysos. He was taken from the Meros, or thigh of Jupiter. Now
Mount Meru, in India, is the home of the gods; by a common etymological
error the Greeks may have thought it the Greek word for _thigh_, and so
translated it.

The Bacchic worship, in its Thracian form, was always distasteful to the
best of the Greeks; it was suspected and disliked by the enlightened,
proscribed by kings, and rejected by communities. It was an interpolated
system, foreign to the cheerful nature of Greek thought.

As to the value of the mysteries themselves, there was a great difference
of opinion among the Greeks. The people, the orators, and many of the
poets praised them; but the philosophers either disapproved them openly,
or passed them by in silence. Socrates says no word in their favor in all
his reported conversations. Plato complains of the immoral influence
derived from believing that sin could be expiated by such ceremonies.[262]
They seem to have contained, in reality, little direct instruction, but to
have taught merely by a dramatic representation and symbolic pictures.

Who Orpheus was, and when he lived, can never be known. But the
probabilities are that he brought from Egypt into Greece, what Moses took
from Egypt into Palestine, the Egyptian ideas of culture, law, and
civilization. He reformed the Bacchic mysteries, giving them a more
elevated and noble character, and for this he lost his life. No better
account of his work can be given than in the words of Lord Bacon.

"The merits of learning," says he, "in repressing the inconveniences
which grow from man to man, was lively set forth by the ancients in
that feigned relation of Orpheus' theatre, where all beasts and birds
assembled; and, forgetting their several appetites, some of prey, some
of game, some of quarrel, stood all sociably together, listening to the
airs and accords of the