The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

CHAPTER III.

MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

THE folly and paganism of some of the Church dogmas, the rapacious haughtiness of its spirit, the tyranny of its rule, and the immoral character of many of its practices, had often awakened the indignant protests and the determined opposition of men of enlightened minds, vigorous consciences, and generous hearts, both in its bosom and out of it. Many such men, vainly struggling to purify the Church from its iniquitous errors or to relieve mankind from its outrageous burdens, had been silenced and crushed by its relentless might. Arnold, Wickliffe, Wessel, Savonarola, and a host of others, are to be gratefully remembered forever as the heroic though unsuccessful forerunners of the mighty monk of Wittenberg.1 The corruption of the mediaval Church grew worse, and became so great as to stir a very extensive disgust and revulsion. Wholesale pardons for all their sins were granted indiscriminately to those who accepted the terms of the papal officials; while every independent thinker, however evangelical his faith and exemplary his character, was hopelessly doomed to hell. Especially were these pardons given to pilgrims and to the Crusaders. Bernard of Clairvaux, exhorting the people to undertake a new Crusade, tells them that "God condescends to invite into his service murderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in other crimes; and whosoever falls in this cause shall secure pardon for the sins which he has never confessed with contrite heart."2 At the opening of "Piers the Ploughman's Crede" a person is introduced saying, "I saw a company of pilgrims on their way to Rome, who came home with leave to lie all the rest of their lives!" Nash, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaks of a proclamation which caused "three hundred thousand people to roam to Rome for purgatorie pills." Ecclesiasticism devoured ethics. Allegiance to morality was lowered into devotion to a ritual. The sale of indulgences at length became too impudent and blasphemous to be any longer endured, when John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, travelled over Europe, and, setting up his auction block in the churches, offered for sale those famous indulgences of Leo X. which promised, to every one rich enough to pay the requisite price, remission of all sins, however enormous, and whether past, present, or future!3 This brazen but authorized charlatan boasted that "he had saved more souls from hell by the sale of indulgences than St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching." He also said that "even if any one had ravished the Mother of God he could sell him a pardon for it!" The soul of Martin Luther took fire. The consequence to which a hundred combining causes contributed was the Protestant Reformation. This great movement produced, in relation to our subject, three important results. It noticeably modified the practice and the popular preaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

1 Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation.

2 Epist. CCCLXIII. ad Orientalis Francia Clerum et Populum.

3 D'Aubigne, Hist. Reformation, book iii.

The dogmas of the Romanist theology remained as they were before. But a marked change took place in the public conduct of the papal functionaries. Morality was made more prominent, and mere ritualism less obtrusive. Comparatively speaking, an emphasis was taken from ecclesiastic confession and indulgence, and laid upon ethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at this time, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In granting indulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest, by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated." Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and less terrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miracles grew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded, and the open traffic in forgiveness of sins, or the compounding for deficiencies, diminished. But among the more ignorant papal multitudes the mediaval superstition holds its place still in all its virulence and grossness. "Heaven and hell are as much a part of the Italian's geography as the Adriatic and the Apennines; the Queen of Heaven looks on the streets as clear as the morning star; and the souls in purgatory are more readily present to conception than the political prisoners immured in the dungeons of Venice."

A second consequence of the Reformation is seen in the numerous dissenting sects to which its issues gave rise. The chief peculiarities of the Protestant doctrines of the future life are embodied in the four leading denominations commonly known as Lutheran, Calvinistic, Unitarian, and Universalist. Each of these includes a number of subordinate parties bearing distinctive names, (such as Arminian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Restorationist, and many others;) but these minor differences are too trivial to deserve distinctive characterization here. The Lutheran formula is that, through the sacrifice of Christ, salvation is offered to all who will accept it by a sincere faith. Some will comply with these terms and secure heaven; others will not, and so will be lost forever. Luther's views were not firmly defined and consistent throughout his career; they were often obscure, and they fluctuated much. It is true he always insisted that there was no salvation without faith, and that all who had faith should be saved. But, while he generally seems to believe in the current doctrine of eternal damnation, he sometimes appears to encourage the hope that all will finally be saved. In a remarkable letter to Hansen von Rechenberg, dated 1522, he says, in effect, "Whoso hath faith in Christ shall be saved. God forbid that I should limit the time for acquiring this faith to the present life! In the depths of the Divine mercy, there may be opportunity to win it in the future state."

The Calvinistic formula is that heaven is attainable only for those whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; all others are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christian theologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popular breast. The Roman Catholic Church had earnestly repudiated it. Gotteschalk was condemned and died in prison for advocating it, in the ninth century. But Calvin's character enabled him to believe it, and his talents and position gave great weight to his advocacy of it, and it has since been widely received. Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, all agreed in the general proposition that by sin physical death came into the world, heaven was shut against man, and all men utterly lost. They differed only in some unessential details concerning the condition of that lost state. They also agreed in the general proposition that Christ came, by his incarnation, death, descent to hell, resurrection, and ascension, to redeem men from their lost state. They only differed in regard to the precise grounds and extent of that redemption. The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to eternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased the predestined salvation of the chosen few. Furthermore, Lutherans and Calvinists, in all their varieties, agree with the Romanist in asserting that Christ shall come again, the dead be raised bodily, a universal judgment be held, and that then the condemned shall sink into the everlasting fire of hell, and the accepted rise into the endless bliss of heaven.

The Socinian doctrine relative to the future fate of man differed from the foregoing in the following particulars. First, it limited the redeeming mission of Christ to the enlightening influences of the truths which he proclaimed with Divine authority, the moral power of his perfect example, and the touching motives exhibited in his death. Secondly, it asserted a natural ability in every man to live a life conformed to right reason and sound morality, and promised heaven to all who did this in obedience to the instructions and after the pattern of Christ. Thirdly, it declared that the wicked, after suffering excruciating agonies, would be annihilated. Respecting the second coming of Christ, a physical resurrection of the dead, and a day of judgment, the Socinians believed with the other sects.4 Their doctrine scarcely corresponds with that of the present Unitarians in any thing. The dissent of the Unitarian from the popular theology is much more fundamental, detailed, and consistent than that of the Socinian was, and approaches much closer to the Rationalism of the present day.

The Universalist formula every soul created by God shall sooner or later be saved from sin and woe and inherit everlasting happiness has been publicly defended in every age of the Christian Church.5 It was first publicly condemned as a heresy at the very close of the fourth century. It ranks among its defenders the names of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and several other prominent Fathers. Universalism has been held in four forms, on four grounds. First, it has been supposed that Christ died for all, and that, by the infinite efficacy of his redeeming merits, all sins shall be cancelled and every soul be saved. This was the scheme of those early Universalist Christians whom Epiphanius condemns as heretics; also of a few in more modern times. Secondly, it has been thought that each person would be punished in the future state according to the deeds done in the body, each sin be expiated by a proportionate amount of suffering, the retribution of some souls being severe and long, that of others light and brief; but, every penalty being at

4 Flugge gives a full exposition of these points with references to the authorities. Lehre vom Zustande, u. s. f., abth. ii. ss. 243-260.

5 Dietelmaier, Commenti Fanatici [non-ASCII characters omitted] Hist. Antiquar.

length exhausted, the last victim would be restored. This was the notion of Origen, the basis of the doctrine of purgatory, and the view of most of the Restorationists. Thirdly, it has been imagined that, by the good pleasure and fixed laws of God, all men are destined to an impartial, absolute, and instant salvation beyond the grave: all sins are justly punished, all moral distinctions equitably compensated, in this life; in the future an equal glory awaits all men, by the gracious and eternal election of God, as revealed to us in the benignant mission of Christ. This is the peculiar conception distinguishing some members of the denomination now known as Universalists. Finally, it has been believed that the freedom and probation granted here extend into the life to come; that the aim of all future punishment will be remedial, beneficent, not revengeful; that stronger motives will be applied for producing repentance, and grander attractions to holiness be felt; and that thus, at some time or other, even the most sunken and hardened souls will be regenerated and raised up to heaven in the image of God. Almost all Universalists, most Unitarians, and large number of individual Christians outwardly affiliated with other denominations, now accept and cherish this theory.

One important variation from the doctrine of the dominant sects, in connection with the present subject, is worthy of special notice. We refer to the celebrated controversy waged in England, in the first part of the eighteenth century, in regard to the intermediate state of the dead. The famous Dr. Coward and a few supporters labored, with much zeal, skill, and show of learning, to prove the natural mortality of the soul. They asserted this to be both a philosophical truth proved by scientific facts and a Christian doctrine declared in Scripture and taught by the Fathers. They argued that the soul is not an independent entity, but is merely the life of the body. Proceeding thus far on the principles of a materialistic science, they professed to complete their theory from Scripture, without doing violence to any doctrine of the acknowledged religion.6 The finished scheme was this. Man was naturally mortal; but, by the pleasure and will of God, he would have been immortally preserved alive had he not sinned. Death is the consequence of sin, and man utterly perishes in the grave. But God will restore the dead, through Christ, at the day of the general resurrection which he has foretold in the gospel.7 Some of the writers in this copious controversy maintained that previous to the advent of Christ death was eternal annihilation to all except a few who enjoyed an inspired anticipatory faith in him, but that all who died after his coming would be restored in the resurrection, the faithful to be advanced to heaven, the wicked to be the victims of unending torture.8 Clarke and Baxter both wrote with extreme ability in support of the natural immortality and separate existence of the soul. On the other hand, the learned Henry Dodwell cited, from the lore of three thousand years, a plausible body of authorities to show that the soul is in itself but a mortal breath. He also contended, by a singular perversion of figurative phrases from the New Testament and from some of the Fathers, that,

6 Coward, Search after Souls.

7 Hallet, No Resurrection, no Future State.

8 Coward, Defence of the Search after Souls. Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse. Peckard, Observations. Fleming, Survey of the Search after Souls. Law, State of Separate Spirits. Layton, Treatise of Departed Souls.

in counteraction of man's natural mortality, all who undergo baptism at the hands of the ordained ministers of the Church of England the only true priesthood in apostolic succession thereby receive an immortalizing spirit brought into the world by Christ and committed to his successors. This immortalizing spirit conveyed by baptism would secure their resurrection at the last day. Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from the oblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually be the case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarily immortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternal misery in hell! Absurd and shocking as this fancy was, it obtained quite a number of converts, and made no slight impression at the time. One of the writers in this controversy asserted that Luther himself had been a believer in the death or sleep of the soul until the day of judgment.9 Certain it is that such a belief had at one period a considerable prevalence. Its advocates were called Psychopannychians. Calvin wrote a vehement assault on them. The opinion has sunk into general disrepute and neglect, and it would be hard to find many avowed disciples of it. The nearly universal sentiment of Christendom would now exclaim, in the quaint words of Henry More,

"What! has old Adam snorted all this time Under some senselesse clod, with sleep ydead?" 10

John Asgill printed, in the year 1700, a tract called "An argument to prove that by the new covenant man may be translated into eternal life without tasting death." He argues that the law of death was a consequence of Adam's sin and was annulled by Christ's sacrifice. Since that time men have died only because of an obstinate habit of dying formed for many generations. For his part, he has the independence and resolution to withstand the universal pusillanimity and to refuse to die. He has discovered "an engine in Divinity to convey man from earth to heaven." He will "play a trump on death and show himself a match for the devil!"

While treating of the various Protestant views of the future life, it would be a glaring defect to overlook the remarkable doctrine on that subject published by Emanuel Swedenborg and now held by the intelligent, growing body of believers called after his name. It would be impossible to exhibit this system adequately in its scientific bases and its complicated details without occupying more space than can be afforded here. Nor is this necessary, now that his own works have been translated and are easily accessible everywhere. His "Heaven and Hell," "Heavenly Arcana," "Doctrine of Influx," and "True Christian

9 Blackburne, View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate State: appendix. It is probable that the great Reformer's opinion on this point was not always the same. For he says, distinctly, "The first man who died, when he awakes at the last day, will think he has been asleep but an hour" Beste, Dr. M. Luther's Glaubenslehre, cap. iv.: Die Lehre von den Letzen Dingen. Yet. J. S. Muller seems conclusively to prove the truth of the proposition which forms the title of his book, "Dass Luther die Lehre vom Seelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe."

10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soul has within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants were Dobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H. Hinton, London, 1849.

Religion," contain manifold statements and abundant illustrations of every thing important bearing on his views of the theme before us. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of the essential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions of criticism.

Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal, and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of man's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will is disinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, then man fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is a spirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, is humbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. But when his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding is falsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destiny inverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he is placed in freedom, on probation, between these two alternatives.

The Swedenborgian universe is divided into four orders of abodes. In the highest or celestial world are the heavens of the angels. In the lowest or infernal world are the hells of the demons. In the intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited by men, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls, escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sink to hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this life man is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between the influences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man is full of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompanied by swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him like themselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediate influx is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man's thoughts and affections. The good spirits are in communication with heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evil spirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what is evil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man is in an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself, if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he is thereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if he turns, on the contrary, with predominant love to the bad spirits, he is placed in conjunction with hell and draws his life thence. From heaven, therefore, through the good spirits, all the elements of saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by the freedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits, all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and are appropriated by the freedom of the bad man.

The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when the Lord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows into every organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but is received as truth and good only by the true and good. It is rejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love with falsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colors varying with the substances it falls on, and water takes forms corresponding to the vessels it is poured into.

The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state is peopled solely from the different families of the human race occupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good, on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There is no angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not a personality, but is a figurative term standing for the whole complex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in one sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They virtually cease because all our present measures of them are annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences to them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by the revolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states; space is measured not by way marks and the traversing of distances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those who are unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who are alike are together in their interiors. Thought and love, forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatial boundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn material impediments, and are united or separate, reciprocally visible or invisible, mutually conscious or unconscious, according to their own laws of kindred or alien adaptedness.

The soul the true man is its own organized and deathless body, and when it leaves its earthly house of flesh it knows the only resurrection, and the cast off frame returns to the dust forever. Swedenborg repeatedly affirms with emphasis that no one is born for hell, but that all are born for heaven, and that when any one comes into hell it is from his own free fault. He asserts that every infant, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or out of it, whether of pious parents or of impious, when he dies is received by the Lord, and educated in heaven, and becomes an angel. A central principle of which he never loses sight is that "a life of charity, which consists in acting sincerely and justly in every function, in every engagement, and in every work, from a heavenly motive, according to the Divine laws, is possible to every one, and infallibly leads to heaven." It does not matter whether the person leading such a life be a Christian or a Gentile. The only essential is that his ruling motive be divine and his life be in truth and good.

The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission is that he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for the purpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for the lost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing the rampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernal spirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many important truths. The advantage of the Christian over the pagan is that the former is enlightened by the celestial knowledge contained in the Bible, and animated by the affecting motives presented in the drama of the Divine incarnation. There is no probation after this life. Just as one is on leaving the earth he goes into the spiritual world. There his

11 Philo the Jew says, (vol. i. p. 277, ed. Mangey,) "God is the Father of the world: the world is the father of time, begetting it by its own motion: time, therefore, holds the place of grandchild to God." But the world is only one measure of time; another, and a more important one, is the inward succession of the spirit's states of consciousness. Between Philo and Swedenborg, it may be remarked here, there are many remarkable correspondences both of thought and language. For example, Philo says, (vol. i. p. 494,) "Man is a small kosmos, the kosmos is a grand man."

ruling affection determines his destiny, and that affection can never be extirpated or changed to all eternity. After death, evil life cannot in any manner or degree be altered to good life, nor infernal love be transmuted to angelic love, inasmuch as every spirit from head to foot is in quality such as his love is, and thence such as his life is, so that to transmute this life into the opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. It were easier, says Swedenborg, to change a night bird into a dove, an owl into a bird of paradise, than to change a subject of hell into a subject of heaven after the line of death has been crossed. But why the crossing of that line should make such an infinite difference he does not explain; nor does he prove it as a fact.

The moral reason and charitable heart of Swedenborg vehemently revolted from the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and vicarious atonement, and the group of thoughts that cluster around them. He always protests against these dogmas, refutes them with varied power and consistency; and the leading principles of his own system are creditable to human nature, and attribute no unworthiness to the character of God. A debt of eternal gratitude is due to Swedenborg that his influence, certainly destined to be powerful and lasting, is so clearly calculated to advance the interests at once of philosophic intelligence, social affection, and true piety. The superiorities of his view of the future life over those which it seeks to supplant are weighty and numerous. The following may be reckoned among the most prominent.

First, without predicating of God any aggravated severity or casting the faintest shadow on his benevolence, it gives us the most appalling realization of the horribleness of sin and of its consequences. God is commonly represented in effect, at least as flaming with anger against sinners, and forcibly flinging them into the unappeasable fury of Tophet, where his infinite vengeance may forever satiate itself on them. But, Swedenborg says, God is incapable of hatred or wrath: he casts no one into hell; but the wicked go where they belong by their own election, from the inherent fitness and preference of their ruling love. The evil man desires to be in hell because there he finds his food, employment, and home; in heaven he would suffer unutterable agonies from every circumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of all the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of the popular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep of loathsomeness immeasurably lower still.

Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions of salvation or reprobation, when compared with the popular doctrine, is marked by striking depth of insight, justice, and liberality. Every man is free. Every man has power to receive the influx of truth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed and saving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor, and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in what land or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who perverts those Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes a subject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mere ritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these things together, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but the controlling motive of his life, the central and ruling love which constitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man's doom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so is the doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are in heaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight, and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according to their capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical character pervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all.

Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over the popular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes between the present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God and man. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance into which is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramental subterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personal goodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apex of the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and see him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every instant. The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches, fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body, the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits, unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to states and acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before this view the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwritten with the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with the illumination of God.

We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness, denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating progress. We have never been able to see force enough in any of the arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendous horror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. For ourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that God cannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are the final aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant of consciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner or later, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capable of intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from the Infinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue and blessedness, and never retrograde again.

Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg and by his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system of theology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It is asserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw what had hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh, namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of the spiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculations or arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptions not fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcripts of the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of known experience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen no proof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological and religious history, it is far more likely that a man should confound his intangible reveries with solid fact than that he should be inspired by God to reveal a world of mysterious truths. Furthermore, while we are impressed with the reasonableness, probability, and consistency of most of the general principles of Swedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrink from many of the details and forms in which he carries them out. Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of his school that all his details are strictly necessitated by his premises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we are compelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purely arbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful. But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientific representation of the reality, and looking at it as a poetic structure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on the ground of reason, nature, and morality, whose foundation walls, columns, and grand outlines are truth, while many of its details, ornaments, and images are fancy, it must be acknowledged to be one of the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in the literature of the world. No one who has mastered it with appreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed and latent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell and heaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal, exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holiness and love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength of philosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, than are to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of the substance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in which they are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form, only in conception.

Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial world the Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes of angels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever they are, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. But at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness, towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Or consider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfect leasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of little hearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye an aggregation of little eyes. Following out the principle, every society in the spiritual world is a group of spirits arranged in the form of a man, every heaven is a gigantic man composed of an immense number of individuals, and all the heavens together constitute one Grand Man, a countless number of the most intelligent angels forming the head, a stupendous organization of the most affectionate making the heart, the most humble going to the feet, the most useful attracted to the hands, and so on through every part.

With exceptions, then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of the future life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severe scientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not of facts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment are mathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milk seems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is of truthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probable that the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormal frequent or chronic turning of his mind into what is called the ecstatic or clairvoyant state. This condition being spontaneously induced, while he yet, in some unexplained manner, retained conscious possession and control of his usual faculties, he treated his subjective conceptions as objective realities, believed his interior contemplations were accurate visions of facts, and took the strange procession of systematic reveries through his teeming brain for a scenic revelation of the exhaustive mysteries of heaven and hell. "Each wondrous guess beheld the truth it sought, And inspiration flash'd from what was thought."

This hypothesis, taken in conjunction with the comprehensiveness of his mind, the vastness of his learning, the integral correctness of his conscience, and his disciplined habits of thought, will go far towards explaining the unparalleled phenomenon of his theological works; and, though it leaves many things unaccounted for, it seems to us more credible than any other which has yet been suggested.

The last of the three prominent phenomena which as before said followed the Protestant Reformation was rationalism, an attempt to try all religious questions at the tribunal of reason and by the tests of conscience. The great movement led by Luther was but one element in a numerous train of influences and events all yielding their different contributions to that resolute rationalistic tendency which afterwards broke out so powerfully in England, France, and Germany, and, spreading thence into every country in Christendom, has been, in secret and in public, with slow, sure steps, irresistibly advancing ever since. In the history of scholasticism there were three distinct epochs. The first period was characterized by the servile submission and conformity of philosophy to the theology dictated by the Church. The second period was marked by the formal alliance and attempted reconciliation of philosophy and theology. The third period saw an ever increasing jealousy and separation between the philosophers and the theologians.12 Many an adventurous thinker pushed his speculations beyond the limits of the established theology, and deliberately dissented from the orthodox standards in his conclusions. Perhaps Abelard, who openly strove to put all the Church dogmas in forms acceptable to philosophy, and who did not hesitate to reject in many instances what seemed to him unreasonable, deserves to be called the father of rationalism. The works of Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant's "Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason," together with the influence and the writings of many other eminent philosophers, gradually gave momentum to the impulse and popularity to the habits of free thought and criticism even in the realm of theology. The dogmatic scheme of the dominant Church was firmly seized, many errors shaken out to the light and exposed, and many long received opinions questioned and flung into doubt.13 The authenticity of many of the popular doctrines regarding the future life could not fail to be denied as soon as it was attempted as was extensively done about the middle of the eighteenth century to demonstrate them by mathematical methods, with all the array of axioms, theorems, lemmas, doubts, and solutions. Flugge has historically illustrated the employment of this method at considerable length.14

12 Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil., lect. ix.

13 Staudlin, Geschichte des Rationalismus. Saintes, Histoire Critique du Rationalisme en Allemagne, Eng. trans. by Dr. Beard.

14 Geschichte des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, u. s. f., th. iii. abth. ii. ss. 281-289.

The essence of rationalism is the affirmation that neither the Fathers, nor the Church, nor the Scriptures, nor all of them together, can rightfully establish any proposition opposed to the logic of sound philosophy, the principles of reason, and the evident truth of nature. Around this thesis the battle has been fought and the victory won; and it will stand with spreading favor as long as there are unenslaved and cultivated minds in the world. This position is, in logical necessity, and as a general thing in fact, that of the large though loosely cohering body of believers known as "Liberal Christians;" and it is tacitly held by still larger and ever growing numbers nominally connected with sects that officially eschew it with horror. The result of the studies and discussions associated with this principle, so far as it relates to the subject before us, has been the rejection of the following popular doctrines: the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures as an ultimate authority in matters of belief; unconditional predestination; the satisfaction theory of the vicarious atonement; the visible second coming of Christ, in person, to burn up the world and to hold a general judgment; the intermediate state of souls; the resurrection of the body; a local hell of material fire in the bowels of the earth; the eternal damnation of the wicked. These old dogmas,15 scarcely changed, still remain in the stereotyped creeds of all the prominent denominations; but they slumber there to an astonishing extent unrealized, unnoticed, unthought of, by the great multitude of common believers, while every consciously rational investigator vehemently repudiates them. To every candid mind that has really studied their nature and proofs their absurdity is now transparent on all the grounds alike of history, metaphysics, morals, and science.

The changes of the popular Christian belief in regard to three salient points have been especially striking. First, respecting the immediate fate of the dead, an intermediate state. The predominant Jewish doctrine was that all souls went indiscriminately into a sombre under world, where they awaited a resurrection.

The earliest Christian view prevalent was the same, with the exception that it divided that place of departed spirits into two parts, a painful for the bad, a pleasant for the good. The next opinion that prevailed the Roman Catholic was the same as the foregoing, with two exceptions: it established a purgatory in addition to the previous paradise and hell, and it opened heaven itself for the immediate entrance of a few spotless souls. Pope John XXII., as Gieseler shows, was accused of heresy by the theological doctors of Paris because he declared that no soul could enter heaven and enjoy the beatific vision until after the resurrection. Pope Benedict XII. drew up a list of one hundred and seventeen heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians. One of these notions was that the souls of all deceased adults wander in the air until the Day of Judgment, neither hell, paradise, nor heaven being open to them until after that day. Thomas Aquinas says, "Each soul at death immediately flies to its appointed place, whether in hell or in heaven, being without the body until the resurrection, with it afterwards."16 Then came the

15 They are defended in all their literal grossness in the two following works, both recent publications. The World to Come; by the Rev. James Cochrane. Der Tod, das Todtenreich, und der Zustand der abgeschiedenen Seelen; von P. A. Maywahlen.

16 Summa iii. in Suppl. 69. 2.

dogma of the orthodox Protestants, slightly varying in the different sects, but generally agreeing that at death all redeemed souls pass instantly to heaven and all unredeemed souls to hell.17 The principal variation from this among believers within the Protestant fellowship has been the notion that the souls of all men die or sleep with the body until the Day of Judgment, a notion which peeps out here and there in superstitious spots along the pages of ecclesiastical history, and which has found now and then an advocate during the last century and a half. The Council of Elvin, in Spain, forbade the lighting of tapers in churchyards, lest it should disturb the souls of the deceased buried there. At this day, in prayers and addresses at funerals, no phrases are more common than those alluding to death as a sleep, and implying that the departed one is to slumber peacefully in his grave until the resurrection. And yet, at the same time, by the same persons contrary ideas are frequently expressed. The truth is, the subject, owing to the contradictions between their creed and their reason, is left by most persons in hopeless confusion and uncertainty. They have no determinately reconciled and conscious views of their own. Rationalism sweeps away all the foregoing incongruous medley at once, denying that we know any thing about the precise localities of heaven and hell, or the destined order of events in the hidden future of separate souls; affirming that all we should dare to say is simply that the souls whether of good or of bad men, on leaving the body, go at once into a spiritual state of being, where they will live immortally, as God decrees, never returning to be reinvested with the vanished charnel houses of clay they once inhabited.

Secondly, the thought that Christ after his death descended into the under world to ransom mankind, or a part of mankind, from the doom there, is in the foundation of the apostolic theology. It was a central element in the belief of the Fathers, and of the Church for fourteen hundred years. None of the prominent Protestant reformers thought of denying it. Calvin lays great stress on it.18 Apinus and others, at Hamburg, maintained that Christ's descent was a part of his humiliation, and that in it he suffered unutterable pains for us. On the other hand, Melancthon and the Wittenbergers held that the descent was a part of Christ's triumph, since by it he won a glorious victory over the powers of hell.19 But gradually the importance and the redeeming effects attached to Christ's descent into hell were transferred to his death on the cross. Slowly the primitive dogma dwindled away, and finally sunk out of sight, through an ever encroaching disbelief in the physical conditions on which it rested and in the pictorial environments by which it was recommended. And now it is scarcely ever heard of, save when brought out from old scholastic tomes by some theological delver. Baumgarten Crusius has learnedly illustrated the important place long held by this notion, and well shown its gradual retreat into the unnoticed background.20

17 Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, ch. xxxii. Calvin, Institutes, lib. iii. cap. xxv.; and his Psychopannychia. Quenstedt also affirms it. Likewise the Confession of Faith of the Westminster Divines, art. xxxii., says, "Souls neither die nor sleep, but go immediately to heaven or hell."

18 Institutes, lib. ii. cap. 16, sects. 16, 19.

19 Ledderhose, Life of Melancthon, Eng. trans. by Krotel, ch. xxx.

20 Compendium der Christliche Dogmengeschichte, thl. ii. sects. 100-109.

The other particular doctrine which we said had undergone remarkable change is in regard to the number of the saved. A blessed improvement has come over the popular Christian feeling and teaching in respect to this momentous subject. The Jews excluded from salvation all but their own strict ritualists. The apostles, it is true, excluded none but the stubbornly wicked. But the majority of the Fathers virtually allowed the possibility of salvation to few indeed. Chrysostom doubted if out of the hundred thousand souls constituting the Christian population of Antioch in his day one hundred would be saved! 21 And when we read, with shuddering soul, the calculations of Cornelius a Lapide, or the celebrated sermon of Massillon on the "Small Number of the Saved," we are compelled to confess that they fairly represent the almost universal sentiment and conviction of Christendom for more than seventeen hundred years. A quarto volume published in London in 1680, by Du Moulin, called "Moral Reflections upon the Number of the Elect," affirmed that not one in a million, from Adam down to our times, shall be saved. A flaming execration blasted the whole heathen world, 22 and a metaphysical quibble doomed ninety nine of every hundred in Christian lands. Collect the whole relevant theological literature of the Christian ages, from the birth of Tertullian to the death of Jonathan Edwards, strike the average pitch of its doctrinal temper, and you will get this result: that in the field of human souls Satan is the harvester, God the gleaner; hell receives the whole vintage in its wine press of damnation, heaven obtains only a few straggling clusters plucked for salvation. The crowded wains roll staggering into the iron doorways of Satan's fire and brimstone barns; the redeemed vestiges of the world crop of men are easily borne to heaven in the arms of a few weeping angels. How different is the prevailing tone of preaching and belief now! What a cheerful ascent of views from the mournful passage of the dead over the river of oblivion fancied by the Greeks, or the excruciating passage of the river of fire painted by the Catholics, to the happy passage of the river of balm, healing every weary bruise and sorrow, promised by the Universalists! It is true, the old harsh exclusiveness is still organically imbedded in the established creeds, all of which deny the possibility of salvation beyond the little circle who vitally appropriate the vicarious atonement of Christ; but then this is, for the most part, a dead letter in the creeds. In the hearts and in the candid confessions of all but one in a thousand it is discredited and sincerely repelled as an abomination to human nature, a reflection against God, an outrage upon the substance of ethics. Remorseless bigots may gloat and exult over the thought that those who reject their dogmas shall be thrust into the roaring fire gorges of hell; but a better spirit is the spirit of the age we live in; and, doubtless, a vast majority of the men we daily meet really believe that all who try to the best of their ability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what is right, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that moving scene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent and hapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to win from the Church official

21 In Acta Apostolorum, homil. xxiv.

22 Gotze, Ueber die Neue Meinung von der Seligkeit der angeblich guten und redlichen Seelen unter Juden, Heiden, und Turken durch Christum, ohne dass sie an ihn glauben.

the full funeral rites of religion over her grave, the priest may stand for the false and cruel ritual spirit, the brother for the just and native sentiment of the human heart. Says the priest, "We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem and such rest to her As to peace parted souls." And Laertes replies, "Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh Shall violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be When thou liest howling."

Indeed, who that has a heart in his bosom would not be ashamed not to sympathize with the gentle hearted Burns when he expresses even to the devil himself the quaint and kindly wish, "Oh wad ye tak' a thought and mend!"

The creeds and the priests, in congenial alliance with many evil things, may strive to counteract this progressive self emancipation from cruel falsehoods and superstitions, but in vain. The terms of salvation are seen lying in the righteous will of a gracious God, not in the heartless caprice of a priesthood nor in the iron gripe of a set of dogmas. The old priestly monopoly over the way to heaven has been taken off in the knowledge of the enlightened present, and, for all who have unfettered feet to walk with, the passage to God is now across a free bridge. The ancient exactors may still sit in their toll house creeds and confessionals; but their authority is gone, and the virtuous traveller, stepping from the ground of time upon the planks that lead over into eternity, smiles as he passes scot free by their former taxing terrors.

The reign of sacramentalists and dogmatists rapidly declines. Reason, common sentiment, the liberal air, the best and strongest tendencies of the people, are against them to day, and will be more against them in every coming day. Every successive explosion of the Second Adventist fanaticism will leave less of that element behind. Its rage in America, under the auspices of Miller, in the nineteenth century, was tame and feeble when compared with the terror awakened in Europe in the fifteenth century by Stofler's prediction of an approaching comet.23 Every new discovery of the harmonies of science, and of the perfections of nature, and of the developments of the linear logic of God consistently unfolding in implicated sequences of peaceful order unperturbed by shocks of failure and epochs of remedy, will increase and popularize an intelligent faith in the original ordination and the intended permanence of the present constitution of things. Finally men will cease to be looking up to see the blue dome cleave open for the descent of angelic squadrons headed by the majestic Son of God, the angry breath of his mouth consuming the world, cease to

23 Bayle, Historical Dictionary, art. Stofler, note B.

expect salvation by any other method than that of earnest and devout truthfulness, love, good works, and pious submissiveness to God, cease to fancy that their souls, after waiting through the long sleep or separation of death, will return and take on their old bodies again. Recognizing the Divine plan for training souls in this lower and transient state for a higher and immortal state, they will endeavor, in natural piety and mutual love, while they live, to exhaust the genuine uses of the world that now is, and thus prepare themselves to enter with happiest auspices, when they die, the world prepared for them beyond these mortal shores.

These cheerful prophecies must be verified in the natural course of things. The rapid spread of the doctrine of a future life taught by the "Spirit rappers" is a remarkable revelation of the great extent to which the minds of the common people have at last become free from the long domination of the ecclesiastical dogmas on that subject. The leading representatives of the "Spiritualists" affirm, with much unanimity, the most comforting conclusions as to the condition of the departed. They exclude all wrath and favoritism from the disposition of the Deity. They have little in fact, they often have nothing whatever to say of hell. They emphatically repudiate the ordinarily taught terms of salvation, and deny the doctrine of hopeless reprobation. All death is beautiful and progressive. "Every form and thing is constantly growing lovelier and every sphere purer." The abode of each soul in the future state is determined, not by decrees or dogmas or forms of any kind, but by qualities of character, degrees of love, purity, and wisdom. There are seven ascending spheres, each more abounding than the one below it in beauties, glories, and happiness. "The first sphere is the natural; the second, the spiritual; the third, the celestial; the fourth, the supernatural; the fifth, the superspiritual; the sixth, the supercelestial; the seventh, the Infinite Vortex of Love and Wisdom."24 Whatever be thought of the pretensions of this doctrine to be a Divine revelation, whatever be thought of its various psychological, cosmological, and theological characteristics, its ethics are those of natural reason. It is wholly irreconcilable with the popular ecclesiastical system of doctrines. Its epidemic diffusion until now burdened as it is with such nauseating accompaniments of crudity and absurdity, it reckons its adherents by millions is a tremendous evidence of the looseness with which the old, cruel dogmas sit on the minds of the masses of the people, and of their eager readiness to welcome more humane views.

In science the erroneous doctrines of the Middle Age are now generally discarded. The mention of them but provokes a smile or awakens surprise. Yet, as compared with the historic annals of our race, it is but recently that the true order of the solar system has been unveiled, the weight of the air discovered, the circulation of the blood made known, the phenomena of insanity intelligently studied, the results of physiological chemistry brought to light, the symmetric domain and sway of calculable law pushed far out in every direction of nature and experience. It used to be supposed that digestion was effected by means of a mechanical power equal to many tons. Borelli asserted that the muscular force of the heart was one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. These absurd estimates only disappeared when the

24 Andrew Jackson Davis, Nature's Divine Revelations, sects. 192 203.

properties of the gastric juice were discerned. The method in which we distinguish the forms and distances of objects was not understood until Berkeley published his "New Theory of Vision." Few persons are aware of the opposition of bigotry, stolidity, and authority against which the brilliant advances of scientific discovery and mechanical invention and social improvement have been forced to contend, and in despite of which they have slowly won their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, polite persecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time the Athenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, to the day an English mob burned the warehouses of Arkwright because he had invented the spinning jenny. But, despite all the hostile energies of establishment, prejudice, and scorn, the earnest votaries of philosophical truth have studied and toiled with ever accumulating victories, until now a hundred sciences are ripe with emancipating fruits and perfect freedom to be taught. Railroads gird the lands with ribs of trade, telegraphs thread the airs with electric tidings of events, and steamships crease the seas with channels of foam and fire. There is no longer danger of any one being put to death, or even being excluded from the "best society," for saying that the earth moves. An eclipse cannot be regarded as the frown of God when it is regularly foretold with certainty. The measurement of the atmosphere exterminated the wiseacre proverb, "Nature abhors a vacuum," by the burlesque addition, "but only for the first thirty two feet." The madman cannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caught as oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained and scourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within the range of organic disease. When Franklin's kite drew electricity from the cloud to his knuckle, the superstitious theory of thunder died a natural death.

The vast progress effected in all departments of physical science during the last four centuries has not been made in any kindred degree in the prevailing theology. Most of the harsh, unreasonable tenets of the elaborately morbid and distorted mediaval theologyare still retained in the creeds of the great majority of Christendom. The causes of this difference are plain. The establishment of newly discovered truths in material science being less intimately connected with the prerogatives of the ruling classes, less clearly hostile to the permanence of their power, they have not offered so pertinacious an opposition to progress in this province: they have yielded a much larger freedom to physicists than to moralists, to discoverers of mathematical, chemical, and mechanical law than to reformers of political and religious thought. Livy tells us that, in the five hundred and seventy third year of Rome, some concealed books of Numa were found, which, on examination by the priests, being thought injurious to the established religion, were ordered to be burned.25 The charge was not that they were ungenuine, nor that their contents were false; but they were dangerous. In the second century, an imperial decree forbade the reading of the Sibylline Oracles, because they contained prophecies of Christ and doctrines of Christianity. By an act of the English Parliament, in the middle of the seventeenth century, every copy of the Racovian Catechism (an exposition of the Socinian doctrine) that could be obtained was burned in the streets.

25 Lib. xl. cap. xxix.

The Index Expurgatorius for Catholic countries is still freshly filled every year. And in Protestant countries a more subtle and a more effectual influence prevents, on the part of the majority, the candid perusal of all theological discussions which are not pitched in the orthodox key. Certain dogmas are the absorbed thought of the sects which defend them: no fresh and independent thinking is to be expected on those subjects, no matter how purely fictitious these secretions of the brain of the denomination or of some ancient leader may be, no matter how glaringly out of keeping with the intelligence and liberty which reign in other realms of faith and feeling. There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny so pervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department of theological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrender of the grand privileges and duties of individual thought, independent personal conviction and action in religious matters, is at once astonishing, pernicious, and disgraceful. The effect of entrenched tradition, priestly directors, a bigoted, overawing, and persecuting sectarianism, is nowhere else a hundredth part so powerful or so extensive.

In addition to the bitter determination by interested persons to suppress reforming investigations of the doctrines which hold their private prejudices in supremacy, and to the tremendous social prestige of old establishment, another cause has been active to keep theology stationary while science has been making such rapid conquests. Science deals with tangible quantities, theology with abstract qualities. The cultivation of the former yields visible practical results of material comfort; the cultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results of mental welfare. Accordingly, science has a thousand resolute votaries where theology has one unshackled disciple. At this moment, a countless multitude, furnished with complex apparatus, are ransacking every nook of nature, and plucking trophies, and the world with honoring attention reads their reports. But how few with competent preparation and equipment, with fearless consecration to truth, unhampered, with fresh free vigor, are scrutinizing the problems of theology, enthusiastically bent upon refuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do the conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice, or sophistical evasions and insulting vituperation.

What a striking and painful contrast is afforded by the generous encouragement given to the students of science by the annual bestowment of rewards by the scientific societies such as the Cuvier Prize, the Royal Medal, the Rumford Medal and the jealous contempt and assaults visited by the sectarian authorities upon those earnest students of theology who venture to propose any innovating improvement! Suppose there were annually awarded an Aquinas Prize, a Fenelon Medal, a Calvin Medal, a Luther Medal, a Channing Medal, not to the one who should present the most ingenious defence of any peculiar tenet of one of those masters, but to him who should offer the most valuable fresh contribution to theological truth! What should we think if the French Institute offered a gold medal every year to the astronomer who presented the ablest essay in support of the Ptolemaic system, or if the Royal Society voted a diploma for the best method of casting nativities? Such is the course pursued in regard to dogmatic theology. The consequence has been that while elsewhere the ultimate standard by which to try a doctrine is, What do the most competent judges say? What does unprejudiced reason dictate? What does the great harmony of truth require? in theology it is, What do the committed priests say? How does it comport with the old traditions?

We read in the Hak ul Yakeen that the envoy of Herk, Emperor of Rum, once said to the prophet, "You summon people to a Paradise whose extent includes heaven and earth: where, then, is hell?" Mohammed replied, "When day comes, where is night?" That is to say, according to the traditionary glosses, as day and night are opposite, so Paradise is at the zenith and hell at the nadir. Yes; but if Paradise be above the heavens, and hell below the seventh earth, then how can Sirat be extended over hell for people to pass to Paradise? "We reply," say the authors of the Hak ul Yakeen, "that speculation on this subject is not necessary, nor to be regarded. Implicit faith in what the prophets have revealed must be had; and explanatory surmises, which are the occasion of Satanic doubts, must not be indulged."26 Certainly this exclusion of reason cannot always be suffered. It is fast giving way already. And it is inevitable that, when reason secures its right and bears its rightful fruits in moral subjects as it now does in physical subjects, the mediaval theology must be rejected as mediaval science has been. It is the common doctrine of the Church that Christ now sits in heaven in a human body of flesh and blood. Calvin separated the Divine nature of Christ from this human body; but Luther made the two natures inseparable and attributed ubiquity to the body in which they reside, thus asserting the omnipresence of a material human body, a bulk of a hundred and fifty pounds' weight more or less. He furiously assailed Zwingle's objection to this monstrous nonsense, as "a devil's mask and grandchild of that old witch, mistress Reason." 27 The Roman Church teaches, and her adherents devoutly believe, that the house of the Virgin Mary was conveyed on the wings of angels from Nazareth to the eastern slope of the Apennines above the Adriatic Gulf.28 The English Church, consistently interpreted, teaches that there is no salvation without baptism by priests in the line of apostolic succession. These are but ordinary specimens of teachings still humbly received by the mass of Christians. The common distrust with which the natural operations of reason are regarded in the Church, the extreme reluctance to accept the conclusions of mere reason, seem to us discreditable to the theological leaders who represent the current creeds of the approved sects. Many an influential theologian could learn invaluable lessons from the great guides in the realm of science. The folly which acute learned wise men will be guilty of the moment they turn to theological subjects, where they do not allow reason to act, is both ludicrous and melancholy. The victim of lycanthropy used to be burned alive; he is now placed under the careful treatment of skilful and humane physicians. But the heretic or infidel is still thought to be inspired by the devil, a fit subject for discipline here and hell hereafter. The light shed abroad by the rising spirit of rational investigation must gradually dispel the delusions which lurk in the vales of theology, as it already has dispelled those that formerly haunted the hills of science. The spectres which have so long terrified a childish world will successively vanish

26 Merrick, Hyat ul Kuloob, note 74.

27 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 265, note 2.

28 Christian Remembrancer, April, 1855. A full and able history of the "Holy House of Loretto."

from the path of man as advancing reason, in the name of the God of truth, utters its imperial "Avaunt!"

Henry More wrote a book on the "Immortality of the Soul," printed in London in 1659, just two hundred years ago. It is full of beauty, acumen, and power. He was one of the first men of the time. Yet he seriously elaborates an argument like this: "The scum and spots that lie on the sun are as great an Argument that there is no Divinity in him as the dung of Owls and Sparrows that is found on the faces and shoulders of Idols in Temples are clear evidences that they are no true Deities."29 He also in good faith tells a story like this: "That a Woman with child, seeing a Butcher divide a Swine's head with a Cleaver, brought forth her Child with its face cloven in the upper jaw, the palate, and upper lip to the very nose."30 The progress marked by the contrast of the scientific spirit of the present time with the ravenous credulity of even two centuries back must continue and spread into every province. Some may vilify it; but in vain. Some may sophisticate against it; but in vain. Some may invoke authority and social persecution to stop it; but in vain. Some may appeal to the prejudices and fears of the timid; but in vain. Some may close their own eyes, and hold their hands before their neighbors' eyes, and attempt to shut out the light; but in vain. It will go on. It is the interest of the world that it should go on. It is the manly and the religious course to help this progress with prudence and reverence. Truth is the will of God, the way he has made things to be and to act, the way he wishes free beings to exist and to act. He has ordained the gradual discovery of truth. And despite the struggles of selfish tyranny, and the complacence of luxurious ease, and the terror of ignorant cowardice, truth will be more and more brought to universal acceptance. Some men have fancied their bodies composed of butter or of glass; but when compelled to move out into the sunlight or the crowd they did not melt nor break.31 Esquirol had a patient who did not dare to bend her thumb, lest the world should come to an end. When forced to bend it, she was surprised that the crack of doom did not follow.

The mechanico theatrical character of the popular theology is enough to reveal its origin and its fundamental falsity. The difference between its lurid and phantasmal details and the calm eternal verities in the divinely constituted order of nature is as great as the difference between those stars which one sees in consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare appreciation of such a passage as that which closes Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half detached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the world commences. Now resounds the trump of the angel. The sepulchres burst: the human race issues all at once, and fills the Valley of Jehoshaphat! The Son of Man appears in the clouds; the powers of hell ascend from the infernal depths; the goats are separated from the sheep; the wicked are plunged into the gulf; the just ascend to heaven; God returns to his repose,

29 Preface, p. 10.

30 Ibid. p. 392.

31 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, ch. ix.

and the reign of eternity begins."32 Nothing saves this whole scheme of doctrine from instant rejection except neglect of thought, or incompetence of thought, on the part of those who contemplate it. The peculiar dogmas of the exclusive sects are the products of mental and social disease, psychological growths in pathological moulds. The naked shapes of beautiful women floating around St. Anthony in full display of their maddening charms are interpreted by the Romanist Church as a visible work of the devil. An intelligent physician accounts for them by the laws of physiology, the morbid action of morbid nerves. There is no doubt whatever as to which of these explanations is correct. The absolute prevalence of that explanation is merely a question of time. Meanwhile, it is the part of every wise and devout man, without bigotry, without hatred for any, with strict fidelity to his own convictions, with entire tolerance and kindness for all who differ from him, sacredly to seek after verity himself and earnestly to endeavor to impart it to others. To such men forms of opinion, instead of being prisons, fetters, and barriers, will be but as tents of a night while they march through life, the burning and cloudy column of inquiry their guide, the eternal temple of truth their goal.

The actual relation, the becoming attitude, the appropriate feeling, of man towards the future state, the concealed segment of his destiny, are impressively shown in the dying scene of one of the wisest and most gifted of men, one of the fittest representatives of the modern mind. In a good old age, on a pleasant spring day, with a vast expanse of experience behind him, with an immensity of hope before him, he lay calmly expiring.

"More light!" he cried, with departing breath; and Death, solemn warder of eternity, led him, blinded, before the immemorial veil of awe and secrets. It uprolled as the flesh bandage fell from his spirit, and he walked at large, triumphant or appalled, amidst the unimagined revelations of God.

And now, recalling the varied studies we have passed through, and seeking for the conclusion or root of the matter, what shall we say? This much we will say. First, the fearless Christian, fully acquainted with the results of a criticism unsparing as the requisitions of truth and candor, can scarcely, with intelligent honesty, do more than place his hand on the beating of his heart, and fix his eye on the riven tomb of Jesus, and exclaim, "Feeling here the inspired promise of immortality, and seeing there the sign of God's authentic seal, I gratefully believe that Christ has risen, and that my soul is deathless!" Secondly, the trusting philosopher, fairly weighing the history of the world's belief in a future life, and the evidences on which it rests, can scarcely, with justifying warrant, do less than lay his hand on his body, and turn his gaze aloft, and exclaim, "Though death shatters this shell, the soul may survive, and I confidently hope to live forever." Meanwhile, the believer and the speculator, combining to form a Christian philosophy wherein doubt and faith, thought and freedom, reason and sentiment, nature and revelation, all embrace, even as the truth of things and the experience of life demand, may both adopt for their own the expression wrought for himself by a pure and fervent poet in these freighted lines of pathetic beauty:

32 Genius of Christianity, part ii. book vi. ch. vii.

"I gather up the scattered rays Of wisdom in the early days, Faint gleams and broken, like the light Of meteors in a Northern night, Betraying to the darkling earth The unseen sun which gave them birth; I listen to the sibyl's chant, The voice of priest and hierophant; I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, And what of life and what of death The demon taught to Socrates, And what, beneath his garden trees Slow pacing, with a dream like tread, The solemn thoughted Plato said; Nor Lack I tokens, great or small, Of God's clear light in each and all, While holding with more dear regard Than scroll of heathen seer and bard The starry pages, promise lit, With Christ's evangel overwrit, Thy miracle of life and death, O Holy One of Nazareth!" 33

33 Whittier, Questions of Life.

PART FIFTH.

HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES.

THE power of the old religions was for centuries concentrated in the Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimes wielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by a ramifying private society. None could be admitted into them save with the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, and under solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions, charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, were numerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features, were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of the ancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. The mighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of the periods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluring obscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning of modern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicited opposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led different inquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin, character, scope, meaning, and results.

One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerning the Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esoteric doctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Some writers have maintained that in their symbols and rites was contained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Our own opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period, higher theological views and scientific speculations were unfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult to prove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is much that is plausible to be said on both sides of the question. Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degree of exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form of initiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus," borne away by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that the Eleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all.1 His error seems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy shows of the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatory rites of personal admission within the mystic pale. The notorious

1 Lib. i. sects. 4, 5.

facts that strict inquiry was made into the character and fitness of the applicant before his admission, and that many were openly rejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intruded unprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was the penalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, all are inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that the Mysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escaped being torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicion that in his play he had given a hint of something in the Mysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, and proving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greek orator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, was somewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuous defence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled "Concerning the Mysteries."

A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of the services performed by these companies. Some held that their characteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; others that in abandoned pleasures they were fouler than the Stygian pit. The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaus, Tertullian, and the rest, influenced by a mixture of prejudice, hatred, and horror, against every thing connected with paganism, declared, in round terms, that the Mysteries were unmitigated sinks of iniquity and shame, lust, murder, and all promiscuous deviltry. Without pausing to except or qualify, 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 all 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. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as the year 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which is quite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni Animoruin Natura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata." The consenting testimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancient writers comes down to us in their surviving works to the effect that those who were admitted into the Mysteries were thereby purified, led to holy lives, joined in communion with the gods, and

2 Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.

3 Lib. xxxix. cap. viii xvi.

assured of a better fate than otherwise could be expected in the future state. Two or three specimens from these witnesses will suffice. Aristophanes, in the second act of the Frogs, describes an elysium of the initiates after death, where he says they bound "in sportive dances on rose enamelled meadows; for the light is cheerful only to those who have been initiated."4 Pausanias describes the uninitiated as being compelled in Hades to carry water in buckets bored full of holes.5 Isocrates says, in his Panegyric, "Demeter, the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries, fortifies those who have been initiated against the fear of death, and teaches them to have sweet hopes concerning eternity." The old Orphic verses cited by Thomas Taylor in his Treatise on the Mysteries run thus: "The soul that uninitiated dies Plunged in the blackest mire in Hades lies." 6

The same statement is likewise found in Plato, who, in another place, also explicitly declares that a doctrine of future retribution was taught in the Mysteries and believed by the serious.7 Cicero says, "Initiation makes us both live more honorably and die with better hopes." 8 In seasons of imminent danger as in a shipwreck it was customary for a man to ask his companion, Hast thou been initiated? The implication is that initiation removed fear of death by promising a happy life to follow.9 A fragment preserved from a very ancient author is plain on this subject. "The soul is affected in death just as it is in the initiation into the great Mysteries: thing answers to thing. At first it passes through darkness, horrors, and toils. Then are disclosed a wondrous light, pure places, flowery meads, replete with mystic sounds, dances, and sacred doctrines, and holy visions. Then, perfectly enlightened, they are free: crowned, they walk about worshipping the gods and conversing with good men."10 The principal part of the hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer, is occupied with a narrative of her labors to endow the young Demophoon, mortal child of Metaneira, with immortality. Now, Ceres was the goddess of the Mysteries; and the last part of this very hymn recounts how Persephone was snatched from the light of life into Hades and restored again. Thus we see that the implications of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guidings of all the incidental clews now left us to the real aim and purport of the Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and punishments. All this we shall more fully establish, both by direct proofs and by collateral supports.

It is a well known fact, intimately connected with the different religions of Greece and Asia Minor, that during the time of harvest in the autumn, and again at the season of sowing in the spring, the shepherds, the vintagers, and the people in general, were accustomed to observe certain sacred festivals, the autumnal sad, the vernal joyous. These undoubtedly grew out of the deep sympathy between man and nature over the decay and disappearance, the revival and return, of vegetation. When the hot season had withered the verdure of the

4 Scene iii.

5 Lib. x. cap. xxxi.

6 Phadon, sect. xxxviii.

7 Leg., lib. ix. cap. x.

8 De Leg., lib. ii. cap. xiv.

9 St. John, Hellenes, ch. xi.

10 Sentences of Stobaus, Sermo CXIX.

fields, plaintive songs were sung, their wild melancholy notes and snatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at last in the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains were the annual lamentation of the people over the death of some mythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in the flower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wild beasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom."

Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it was Scephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the Black Sea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas. At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. The untimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in their morning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing over the plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious that these cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathy so general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation," says Muller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the raging heat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of those early times invested with a personal form."11 All this was woven into the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that every autumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the King of Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother's arms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance of vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But these changes of nature typified the changes in the human lot; else Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain and would not have become the Queen of the Dead.12 Her return to the world of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men. Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in saying that these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regard to the condition of the soul after death."13 That the fate of man should by imagination and sentiment have been so connected with the phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in pathetic religious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her fresh benignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, With tresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erst With annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!"

And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossoms put forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentle heart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournful correspondence and the animating prophecy.

11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iii. sects. 2 3.

12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses with agriculture, the seasons, the under world, death, resurrection, etc., see "Demeter and Persephone," von Dr. Ludwig Preller, kap. i. sects. 9 11.

13 Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit., ch. xvi. sect. 2.

But not only was the changing recurrence of dreary winter and gladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doom of death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, the impressive succession of day and night, also were early seized upon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means of imaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease and resurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, so called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial. How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and sad repose of midnight and of death.

The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor
Nature loves to weep."

Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting fruit.

These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years, of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically represented in the personal experience of the initiate, was the heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.

"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted
Mysteries."

14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.

15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.

Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology, by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives. Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations of the earth.

In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked, destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest, inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation, then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration, and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religious festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena, traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future life for man.

In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself, who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing celestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, and

16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.

17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.

18 De Is. et Osir.

19 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her., cap. xl., where he refers the mimic death and resurrection in the Mithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan.

afterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of the natural fate of man.20 The descent of the soul from heaven and its return thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversed and upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, in the round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates of the zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star were depicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to their journeying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere.21

The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, the beautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar. His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated every year at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. The festival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad in mourning, sorrow was depicted in every face, and wails and weeping resounded. Coffins were exposed at every door and borne in numerous processions. Frail stalks of young corn and flowers were thrown into the river to perish, as types of the premature death of blooming Adonis, cut off like a plant in the bud of his age.22 The second day the whole aspect of things was changed, and the greatest exultation prevailed, because it was said Adonis had returned from the dead.23 Venus, having found him dead, deposited his body on a bed of lettuce and mourned bitterly over him. From his blood sprang the adonium, from her tears the anemone.24 The Jews were captivated by the religious rites connected with this touching myth, and even enacted them in the gates of their holy temple. Ezekiel says, "Behold, at the gate of the Lord's house which was towards the north [the direction of night and winter] there sat women weeping for Tammuz." It was said that Aphrodite prevailed on Persephone to let Adonis dwell one half the year with her on earth, and only the rest among the shades, a plain reference to vegetable life in summer and winter.25 Lucian, in his little treatise on the Syrian Goddess, says that "the river Adonis, rising out of Mount Libanus, at certain seasons flows red in its channel: some say it is miraculously stained by the blood of the fresh wounded youth; others say that the spring rains, washing in a red ore from the soil of the country, discolor the stream." Dupuis remarks that this redness was probably an artifice of the priests.26 Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable is familiar to most persons. Next came he "Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea with Thammuz' blood."

20 Julius Firmicus, De Errore Prof. Relig.

21 Mithraica, Memoire Academique sur le Culte Solaire de Mithra, par Joseph de Hammer, pp: 66-68, 125-127. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her., cap. xl. Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lib. iv. sect. 16. Hyde. Hist. Vet. Pers. Relig., p. 254.

22 Hist. du Culte d'Adonis, Mem. Acad. des Inscript., vol. iv. p. 136.

23 Theocritus, Idyl XV.

24 Bion, Epitaph Adon., l. 66.

25 See references in Anthon's Class. Dict., art. Adonis.

26 Dupuis, Orig. de Cultes, vol. iv. p. 121, ed. 1822.

There is no end to the discussions concerning the secret purport of this fascinating story. But, after all is said, it seems to us that there are in it essentially two significations, one relating to the phenomena of the sun and the earth, the other to the mutual changes of nature and the fate of humanity. Aphrodite bewailing Adonis is surviving Nature mourning for departed Man.

In India the story was told of Mahadeva searching for his lost consort Sita, and, after discovering her lifeless form, bearing it around the world with dismal lamentations. Sometimes it was the death of Camadeva, the Hindu Cupid, that was mourned with solemn dirges.27 He, like Osiris, was slain, enclosed in a chest, and committed to the waves. He was afterwards recovered and resuscitated. Each initiate passed through the emblematic ceremonies corresponding to the points of this pretended history. The Phrygians associated the same great doctrine with the persons of Atys and Cybele. Atys was a lovely shepherd youth passionately loved by the mother of the gods.28 He suddenly died; and she, in frantic grief, wandered over the earth in search of him, teaching the people where she went the arts of agriculture. He was at length restored to her. Annually the whole drama was performed by the assembled nation with sobs of woe succeeded by ecstasies of joy.29 Similar to this, in the essential features, was the Eleusinian myth. Aidoneus snatched the maiden Kore down to his gloomy empire. Her mother, Demeter, set off in search of her, scattering the blessings of agriculture, and finally discovered her, and obtained the promise of her society for half of every year. These adventures were dramatized and explained in the mysteries which she, according to tradition, instituted at Eleusis.

The form of the legend was somewhat differently incorporated with the Bacchic Mysteries. It was elaborately wrought up by the Orphic poets. The distinctive name they gave to Bacchus or Dionysus was Zagreus. He was the son of Zeus, and was chosen by him to sit on the throne of heaven. Zeus gave him Apollo and the Curetes as guards; but the brutal Titans, instigated by jealous Hera, disguised themselves and fell on the unfortunate youth while his attention was fixed on a splendid mirror, and, after a fearful conflict, overcame him and tore him into seven pieces. Pallas, however, saved his palpitating heart, and Zeus swallowed it. Zagreus was then begotten again.30 He was destined to restore the golden age. His devotees looked to him for the liberation of their souls through the purifying rites of his Mysteries. The initiation shadowed out an esoteric doctrine of death and a future life, in the mock murder and new birth of the aspirant, who impersonated Zagreus.31

The Northmen constructed the same drama of death around the young Balder, their god of gentleness and beauty. This legend, as Dr. Oliver has shown, constituted the secret of the Gothic Mysteries.32 Obscure and dread prophecies having crept among the gods that the death of the beloved Balder was at hand, portending universal ruin, a consultation was held to devise means for averting the calamity. At the suggestion of Balder's mother, Freya, the Scandinavian Venus, an oath that they would not be instrumental in causing his death was

27 Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 187.

28 See article Atys in Smith's Class. Dict. with references.

29 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, lib. ii. 11. 605-655.

30 Muller, Hist. Greek Lit., ch. xvi.

31 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. iii. cap. 5, sect. 13.

32 History of Initiation, Lect. X.

exacted from all things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe, and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemption from wounds, persuaded him to be the mark for the weapons of the gods. But, alas! when Hodur tilted at him, the devoted victim was transpierced and fell lifeless to the ground. Darkness settled over the world, and bitter was the grief of men and gods over the innocent and lovely Balder. A deputation imploring his release was sent to the queen of the dead. Hela so far relented as to promise his liberation to the upper world on condition that every thing on earth wept for him. Straightway there was a universal mourning. Men, beasts, trees, metals, stones, wept. But an old withered giantess Asa Loke in disguise shed no tears; and so Hela kept her beauteous and lamented prey. But he is to rise again to eternal life and joy when the twilight of the gods has passed.33 This entire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all its details, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of the seasons. But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore a profound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which was interpreted to the initiates.

A great deal has been written concerning the ceremonies and meaning of the celebrated Celtic Mysteries established so long at Samothrace, and under the administration of the Druids throughout ancient Gaul and Britain. The aspirant was led through a series of scenic representations, "without the aid of words," mystically shadowing forth in symbolic forms the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He assumed successively the shapes of a rabbit, a hen, a grain of wheat, a horse, a tree, and so on through a wide range of metamorphoses enacted by the aid of secret dramatic machinery.

He died, was buried, was born anew, rising from his dark confinement to life again. The hierophant enclosed him in a little boat and set him adrift, pointing him to a distant rock, which he calls "the harbor of life." Across the black and stormy waters he strives to gain the beaconing refuge.

In these scenes and rites a recondite doctrine of the physical and moral relations and destiny of man was shrouded, to be unveiled by degrees to their docile disciples by the Druidic mystagogues.34

It may appear strange that there should be in connection with so many of the old religions of the earth these arcana only to be approached by secret initiation at the hands of hierophants. But it will seem natural when we remember that those religions were in the exclusive keeping of priesthoods, which, organized with wondrous cunning and perpetuated through ages, absorbed the science, art, and philosophy of the world, and, concealing their wisdom in the mystic signs of an esoteric language, wielded the mighty enginery of superstition over the people at will. The scenes and instructions through which the priests led the unenlightened candidate were the hiding of their power. Thus, wherever was a priesthood we should expect to find mysteries and initiations. Historic fact justifies the

33 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, pp. 288-300.

34 Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, pp. 207-257; 390-392; 420, 555, 572. The accuracy of many of Davies's translations has been called in question. His statements, even on the matters affirmed above, must be received with some reservation of faith.

supposition; learning unveils the obscure places of antiquity, and shows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world, from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens to Mexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli, established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lecture of his History of Initiation, gathering his materials from various sources, gives a terrific account of the dramatic ritual here employed. The walls, floor, images, were smeared and caked with human blood. Fresh slaughters of victims were perpetrated at frequent intervals. The candidate descended to the grim caverns excavated under the foundations of the temple. This course was denominated "the path of the dead." Phantoms flitted before him, shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatened him. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirant arrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range of caverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the open air, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts by the multitudes who had been waiting for him without during the process of his initiation.

Even among the savage tribes of North America striking traces have been found of an initiation into a secret society by a mystic death and resurrection. Captain Jonathan Carver, who spent the winter of 1776 with the Naudowessie Indians, was an eye witness of the admission of a young brave into a body which they entitled Wakou Kitchewah, or Friendly Society of the Spirit. "This singular initiation," he says, "took place within a railed enclosure in the centre of the camp at the time of the new moon." First came the chiefs, clad in trailing furs. Then came the members of the society, dressed and painted in the gayest manner. When all were seated, one of the principal chiefs arose, and, leading the young man forward, informed the meeting of his desire to be admitted into their circle. No objection being offered, the various preliminary arrangements were made; after which the director began to speak to the kneeling candidate, telling him that he was about to receive a communication of the spirit. This spirit would instantly strike him dead; but he was told not to be terrified, because he should immediately be restored to life again, and this experience was a necessary introduction to the advantages of the community he was on the point of entering. Then violent agitation distorted the face and convulsed the frame of the old chief. He threw something looking like a small bean at the young man. It entered his mouth, and he fell lifeless as suddenly as if he had been shot. Several assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beat his back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him, and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness as a member.36

All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking single phenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darkness with groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumph with shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, a mournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this from the abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers, and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies and allusions to them. For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery of the Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntary death: the initiate, being, after a manner, born

36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.

again, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious recesses; and in connection with them is always found some excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37

It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity, to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death, burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant rejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred to the glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prison into the blooming world. The advocates of this theory have laboriously collected all the materials that favor it, and skilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject of ancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after reading all that they have written, and considering it in the light of impartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have by no means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there be any ground whatever for believing that traditions concerning Noah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them, in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or into the secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events, there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggerated the importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerable bounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now is only so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction is that the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based upon the affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope of another life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary in general, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unable to meet the points presented.

In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief was that below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre under world, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, the Roman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiation was a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing his initiation, says, "I approached to the confines

36 Golden Ass, Eng. trans., by Thomas Taylor, p. 280.

37 Copious instances are given in Oliver's History of Initiation, in Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, and in Maurice's Indian Antiquities.

of death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus, Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with irresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more nor less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark. Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries "the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life, as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and lot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could be either more natural or more impressive than that of a vessel launched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he should trust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, and launch away into the unknown." Thus the imagination broods over and explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings and alluring

38 Golden Ass, Taylor's trans., p. 283.

39 Herodotus, lib. il. cap. cxxii.

40 Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. iv.

41 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. v.: On the Connection of the Fabulous Hades with the Mysteries.

invitations, storms and calms, island homes and unknown havens, of the dim seas of nature and of man, of time and of eternity.42

Thirdly, the defenders of the Arkite theory are driven into gross inconsistencies with themselves by the falsity of their views. The dilaceration of Zagreus into fragments, the mangling of Osiris and scattering of his limbs abroad, they say, refer to the throwing open of the ark and the going forth of the inmates to populate the earth. They usually make Osiris, Zagreus, Adonis, and the other heroes of the legends enacted in the Mysteries, representatives of the diluvian patriarch himself; but here, with no reason whatever save the exigencies of their theory, they make these mythic personages representatives of the ark, a view which is utterly unfounded and glaringly wanting in analogy. When Zagreus is torn in pieces, his heart is preserved alive by Zeus and born again into the world within a human form. After the body of Osiris had been strewn piecemeal, the fragments were fondly gathered by Isis, and he was restored to life. There is no plausible correspondence between these cases and the sending out from the ark of the patriarchal family to repeople the world. Their real purpose would seem plainly to be to symbolize the thought that, however the body of man crumbles in pieces, there is life for him still, he does not hopelessly die. They likewise say that the egg which was consecrated in the Mysteries, at the beginning of the rites, was intended as an emblem of the ark resting on the abyss of waters, and that its latent hatching was meant to suggest the opening of the ark to let the imprisoned patriarch forth. This hypothesis has no proof, and is needless. It is much more plausible to suppose that the egg was meant as a symbol of a new life about to burst upon the candidate, a symbol of his resurrection from the mystic tomb wherein he was buried during one stage of initiation; for we know that the initiation was often regarded as the commencement of a fresh life, as a new birth. Apuleius says, "I celebrated the most joyful day of my initiation as my natal day."

Faber argues, from the very close similarity of all the differently named Mysteries, that they were all Arkite, all derived from one mass of traditions reaching from Noah and embodying his history.43 The asserted fact of general resemblance among the instituted Mysteries is unquestionable; but the inference above drawn from it is unwarrantable, even if no better explanation could be offered. But there is another explanation ready, more natural in conception, more consistent in detail, and better sustained by evidence. The various Mysteries celebrated in the ancient nations were so much alike not because they were all founded on one world wide tradition about the Noachian deluge, but because they all grew out of the great common facts of human destiny in connection with natural phenomena. The Mysteries were funereal and festive, began in sorrow and ended in joy, not because they represented first Noah's sad entrance into the ark and then his glad exit from it, but because they began with showing the initiate that he must die, and ended with showing him that he should live again in a happier state. Even the most prejudiced advocates of the Arkite theory

42 Procopius, in his History of the Gothic War, mentions a curious popular British superstition concerning the ferriage of souls among the neighboring islands at midnight. See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, kap. xxvi. zweite ausgabe.

43 Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10: Comparison of the Various Mysteries.

are forced to admit, on the explicit testimony of the ancients, that the initiates passed from the darkness and horrors of Tartarus to the bliss and splendors of Elysium by a dramatic resurrection from burial in the black caverns of probation to admission within the illuminated hall or dome of perfection.44 That the idea of death and of another life runs through all the Mysteries as their cardinal tenet is well shown in connection with the rites of the celebrated Cave of Trophonius at Lebadea in Boeotia. Whoso sought this oracle must descend head foremost over an inclined plane, bearing a honey cake in his hand. Aristophanes speaks of this descent with a shudder of fear.45 The adventurer was suddenly bereft of his senses, and after a while returned to the upper air. What he could then remember composed the Divine revelation which had been communicated to him in his unnatural state below. Plutarch has given a full account of this experience from one Timarchus, who had himself passed through it.46 The substance of it is this. When Timarchus reached the bottom of the cave, his soul passed from his body, visited the under world of the departed, saw the sphere of generation where souls were reborn into the upper world, received some explanation of all these things: then, returning into the body, he was taken up out of the cave. Here is no allusion to any traditions of the Deluge or the ark; but the great purpose is evidently a doctrine of the destiny of man after death.

Before the eyes and upon the heart of all mankind in every age has passed in common vision the revolution of the seasons, with its beautiful and sombre changes, phenomena having a power of suggestion irresistible to stir some of the most profound sentiments of the human breast. The day rolls overhead full of light and life and activity; then the night settles upon the scene with silent gloom and repose. So man runs his busy round of toil and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funereal blast. The flush of childish gayety, the bloom of youthful promise, when a new comer is growing up sporting about the hearth of home, are like the approach of the maiden and starry Spring, "Who comes sublime, as when, from Pluto free, Came, through the flash of Zeus, Persephone." And then draw hastily on the long, lamenting autumnal days, when "Above man's grave the sad winds wail and rain drops fall, And Nature sheds her leaves in yearly funeral."

44 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10, pp. 331-356. Dion Chrysostom describes this scene: Oration XII.

45 The Clouds, 1. 507.

46 Essay on the Demon of Socrates. See also Pansanias, lib. ix. cap. xxxix.

The flowers are gone, the birds are gone, the gentle breezes are gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus, is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart, enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah and his ark.

The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold; and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions, thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources available by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought to bear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then in their exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles before the astonished novices.47 They had the powers of electricity, gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command.48 Their rites were carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple at Eleusis could hold thirty thousand persons. Imagine what effect might be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances, on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all the scientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered, illumination flashing after darkness successively before their smitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack, thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealed beneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all the shrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; now

47 Anthon's Class. Dict., art. "Elicius."

48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. See also editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. trans. of Salverte's work.

the mild beauties of Elysium dawning on their ravished vision, amid strains of celestial music, through fading clouds of glory, while nymphs, heroes, and gods walked apparent. Clement of Alexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was a display of the grisly secrets of Hades.49 Apuleius, in his account of his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shining with a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lower and to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence." 50 Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytum to the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared to them.51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, says that the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by means of transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied upon the painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, were deposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in a future life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by the dramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparent curtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles.52

It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, and what popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost every nation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly the whole people. Herodotus informs 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 Mysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profound influence alike in fostering the good hopes of human nature touching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to the popular fables of the poets concerning the details of the future state. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we can easily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect what they thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in their initiations.

In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed in connection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe an aristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls an abode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death, while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadow region below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernus is easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to rise into the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whom favoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effect it." 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in this change of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades to the hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil, celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name of Daphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange court of heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. He is a god now." 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declaration that the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac.58 Plato earnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realities above this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, and whither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while the corrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm.59 A similar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to be suggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming back in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven, where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses. Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of justice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplary souls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidst the brilliant orbs of the galaxy." 60 The same author also speaks of certain philosophers who flourished before his time, "whose opinions encouraged the belief that souls departing from bodies would arrive at heaven as their proper dwelling place." 61 He afterwards stigmatizes the notion that the life succeeding death is subterranean as an error,62 and in his own name addresses his auditor thus: "I see you gazing upward and wishing to migrate into heaven." 63 It was the common belief of the Romans for ages that Romulus was taken up into heaven, where he would remain forever, claiming Divine honors.64 The Emperor Julian says, in his Letter on the

55 Essay on Mysteries, by M. Ouvaroff, Eng. trans. by J. D. Price, p. 55.

56 Aneid, lib. vi. 11. 125-130.

57 Ecl. v. 11. 57, 58, 64.

58 De Antro Nympharum.

59 Phado sects. 136-138.

60 Soma. Scipionis.

61 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xi.

62 Ibid. cap. xvi.

63 Ibid. cap. xxxiv.

64 Ennius, e. g., sings, "Romulus in coelo cum diis agit avum"

Duties of a Priest, "God will raise from darkness and Tartarus the souls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious, instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus." "It is lawful," writes Plato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank of gods." 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believe was promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the special prerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into the rank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means to ascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead of being banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the under world.

In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth, and who were called the chthonian gods.66 The hope of immortality first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship. But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle of divinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greater share of attention, and at last received a degree of worship far surpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. The adoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in their benignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimes elevated human favorites to their presence, for instance, receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, the encouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of the philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction, perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in this strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete, whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes, from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they are

65 Phado, sect. lxxi.

66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.

purified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just and established order of nature." 67

The reference in the last clause is to the decrees of the Senate whereby apotheosis was conferred on various persons, placing them among the gods. This ceremony has often been made to appear unnecessarily ridiculous, through a perversion of its actual meaning. When the ancients applied the term "god" to a human soul departed from the body, it was not used as the moderns prevailingly employ that word. It expressed a great deal less with them than with us. It merely meant to affirm similarity of essence, qualities, and residence, but by no means equal dignity and power of attributes between the one and the others. It meant that the soul had gone to the heavenly habitation of the gods and was thenceforth a participant in the heavenly life.68 Heraclitus was accustomed to say, "Men are mortal gods; gods are immortal men." Macrobius says, "The soul is not only immortal, but a god." 69 And Cicero declares, "The soul of man is a Divine thing, as Euripides dares to say, a god." 70 Milton uses language precisely parallel, speaking of those who are "unmindful of the crown true Virtue gives her servants, after their mortal change, among the enthroned gods on sainted seats." Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch in the second century, says that "to become a god means to ascend into heaven." 71 The Roman Catholic ceremony of beatification and canonization of saints, offering them incense and prayers thereafter, means exactly what was meant by the ancient apotheosis, namely, that while the multitudes of the dead abide below, in the intermediate state, these favored souls have been advanced into heaven. The papal functionaries borrowed this rite, with most of its details, from their immediate pagan predecessors, who themselves probably adopted it from the East, whence the Mysteries came. It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhists believed, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrasted fate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens above the clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneath the earth. A knowledge of this attractive Oriental doctrine may have united with the advance of their own speculations to win the partial acceptance obtained among the Greeks and Romans for the faith which broke the universal doom to Hades and opened heaven to their hopeful aspirations. In a tragedy of Euripides the following passage occurs, addressed to the bereaved Admetus: "Let not the tomb of thy wife be looked on as the mound of the ordinary dead. Some wayfarer, as he treads the sloping road, shall say, 'This woman once died for her husband; but now she is a saint in heaven.'" 72

When the meaning of the cheerful promises given to the initiates of a more favored fate in the future life than awaited others namely, as we think, that their spirits on leaving the body should scale Olympus instead of plunging to Tartarus had been concealed within the

67 Lives, Romulus, sect. xxviii.

68 See a valuable discussion of the ancient use of the terms theos and deus in note D vol. iii. of Norton's Genuineness of the Gospels.

69 Somn. Scip., lib. ii. cap. 12.

70 Tusc. Quest., lib. i. cap. 26.

71 We omit several other authorities, as the reader would probably deem any further evidence superfluous.

72 Alcestis, ll. 1015-1025, ed. Glasg.

Mysteries for a long time, it at length broke into public view in the national apotheosis of ancient heroes, kings, and renowned worthies, the instances of which became so numerous that Cicero cries, "Is not nearly all heaven peopled with the human race?" 73 Over the heads of the devout heathen, as they gazed up through the clear night air, twinkled the beams of innumerable stars, each chosen to designate the cerulean seat where some soul was rejoicing with the gods in heaven over the glorious issue of the toils and sufferings in which he once painfully trod this earthly scene.

Herodian, a Greek historian of some of the Roman emperors, has left a detailed account of the rite of apotheosis.74 An image of the person to be deified was made in wax, looking all sick and pale, laid in state on a lofty bed of ivory covered with cloth of gold, surrounded on one side by choirs of noble lords, on the other side by their ladies stripped of their jewels and clad in mourning, visited often for several days by a physician, who still reports his patient worse, and finally announces his decease. Then the Senators and haughtiest patricians bear the couch through the via sacra to the Forum. Bands of noble boys and of proud women ranged opposite each other chant hymns and lauds over the dead in solemn melody. The bier is next borne to the Campus Martius, where it is placed upon a high wooden altar, a large, thin structure with a tower like a lighthouse. Heaps of fragrant gums, herbs, fruits, and spices are poured out and piled upon it. Then the Roman knights, mounted on horseback, prance before it in beautiful bravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhic dance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers, wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famous worthies of other days to the reverential recognition of the silent hosts assembled, ride around the form of their descendant. Suddenly a torch is set to the pile, and it is wrapped in flames. From the turret, amidst the aromatic fumes, an eagle is let loose. Phoenix like symbol of the departed soul, he soars into the sky, and the seven hilled city throbs with pride, reverberating the shouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sic itur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus we see how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike were their deeds."

For it was only in times of degradation and by a violent perversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even in such cases it was usually nullified as soon as the people recovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant among the works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, that is, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharp satire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius. The deification of mortals among the ancients has long been laughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decree for his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the Lacedemonian Senate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be a god, let him be a god." The doctrine is often referred to among us in terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is not understood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after death into the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheronian gulfs. And whether we

73 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. 12.

74 Lib. iv.

consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as a poetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity ensphered above us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regard its comparative probability as the literal location of the residence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as a decided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as a sort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenly home for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world by Him of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is now in heaven." Indeed, so forcible and close is the correspondence between the course of the aspirant in his initiation dramatically dying, descending into Hades, rising again to life, and ascending into heaven with the apostolic presentation of the redemptive career of Christ, our great Forerunner, that some writers Nork, for instance have suggested that the latter was but the exoteric publication to all the world of what in the former was esoterically taught to the initiates alone.

There was a striking naturalness, a profound propriety, in the obscurities of secrecy and awe with which the ancient Mysteries shrouded from a rash curiosity their instructions concerning the future life and only unfolded them by careful degrees to the prepared candidate. It is so with the reality itself in the nature of things. It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted in types, faintly gleaming in analogies, softly whispered in hopes, passionately asked in desires, patiently confirmed in arguments, suddenly blazed and thundered in revelation. Man from the very beginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed by mysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance and superstition. Through one after another of these he has forced his way and gazed on their successive secrets laid bare. Once the Ocean was an alluring and terrible mystery, weltering before him with its endless wash of waves, into which the weary sun, in the west, plunged at evening, and out of which, in the east, it bounded refreshed in the morning. But the daring prows of his ships, guided by pioneering thought and skill, passed its islands and touched its ultimate shores. Once the Polar Circle was a frightful and frozen mystery, enthroned on mountains of eternal ice and wearing upon its snowy brow the flaming crown of the aurora borealis. But his hardy navigators, inspired by enterprise and philanthropy, armed with science, and supplied by art, have driven the awful phantom back, league by league, until but a small expanse of its wonders remains untracked by his steps. Once the crowded Sky was a boundless mystery, a maze of motions, a field where ghastly comets played their antics and shook down terrors on the nations. But the theories of his reason, based on the gigantic grasp of his calculus and aided by the instruments of his invention, have solved perplexity after perplexity, blended discords into harmony, and shown to his delighted vision the calm perfection of the stellar system. So, too, in the moral world he has lifted the shrouds from many a dark problem, and extended the empire of light and love far out over the ancient realm of darkness and terror. But the secret of Death, the mystery of the Future, remains yet, as of old, unfathomed and inscrutable to his inquiries. Still, as of old, he kneels before that unlifted veil and beseeches the oracles for a response to faith.

The ancient Mysteries in their principal ceremony but copied the ordination and followed the overawing spirit of Nature herself. The religious reserve and awe about the entrance into the adytum of their traditions were like those about the entrance into the invisible scenes beyond the veils of time and mortality. Their initiation was but a miniature symbol of the great initiation through which, and that upon impartial terms, every mortal, from King Solomon to the idiot pauper, must sooner or later pass to immortality. When a fit applicant, after the preliminary probation, kneels with fainting sense and pallid brow before the veil of the unutterable Unknown, and the last pulsations of his heart tap at the door of eternity, and he reverentially asks admission to partake in the secrets shrouded from profane vision, the infinite Hierophant directs the call to be answered by Death, the speechless and solemn steward of the celestial Mysteries. He comes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in, takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; and straightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst of that innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the Supreme Author of the Universe presides.