l classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its rites
before immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men like
Plato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of these
bodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on record
eulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimony
of antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires were
chastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired,
all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught and
enforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground for
suspecting this to be false.

But there remains something more and different to be said also.
While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there
did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and
pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the
control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which
unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and
prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign
grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous
climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in
Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as
compelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed and
vivid account of the whole affair in his history.3 But the
gladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stews
of rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble men
and matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pure
Mysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, the
gravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar,
Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in the
numerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the different
organizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of the
Mysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised in
some, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horrible
cruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought in
each.

The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; but
in those aspects we have not space here to examine them. We
purpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrine
of a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of their
secret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and their
end, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding a
death. Gessn