us that there were collected in
Egypt, at one celebration, seven hundred thousand men and women,
besides children.53 The greatest warriors and kings Philip,
Alexander, Sulla, Antony esteemed it an honor to be welcomed
within the mystic pale. "Men," says Cicero, "came from the most
distant shores to be initiated at Eleusis." Sophocles declares, as
quoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among the
initiates: all other places are full of evil." At the rise of the
Christian religion, all the life and power left in the national
religion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly,
here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in its
old entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, it
fought with desperate determination for every inch it was
successively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian to
roll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religion
to more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which the
scales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while was
chiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such was
the attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middle
of the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riot
broke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others were
slain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secret
adytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated.54 And
when, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined to
suppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw his
resolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowed
with every virtue, who represented to him that the

49 Stromata, lib. iii., cited by a writer on the Mysteries in
Blackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203.

50 Taylor's trans. of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 of
this work, the translator describes (with a citation of his
authorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in the
Mysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to be
illuminated and to appear animated."

51 Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 7.

52 Discourse to the Lit. and Sci. Soc. of Java, 1815, pub. in
Valpy's Pamphleteer, No. 15.

53 Lib. ii. cap. ix.

54 Socrates, Ecc. Inst., lib. iii. cap. 2.

Greeks would consider life insupportable if they were forbidden to
celebrate those most sacred Mysteries which bind together the
human race."55 Upon the whole, we cannot fail to see that the