, or to be thoroughly informed and just, they
included the ancient stern generations and their own degraded
contemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and the
solemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanalians
and the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in one
indiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Their
view of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the moderns
by Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity of
a Divine Revelation." He would have us regard each one as a vortex
of atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination.
The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantly
demonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. The
original Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinated
with the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, were
pure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters of
their disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus of
sensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirably
calculated to impress the most salutary moral and religious
lessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state would
fling its auspices over societies whose function was to organize
lawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth?
Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senate
shall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after the
festival, to inquire whether every thing had been done with
reverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character of
these secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moral
habits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance if
they were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decision
unrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch's
life of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordination
in the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries,
"because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughter
of his paternal aunt."2 All accepted candidates were scrupulously
purified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for nine
days previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsically
absurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality and
cruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greek
nation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundred
years, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, of
al