“Sweet are the uses of adversity;”
and, hence, of those trials which ignorance regards as evils, most, if not all, are but so many dispensations of mercy, designed to work off the dross of sin, and restore the spirit to its original brightness.[[1018]] By these means, likewise, transgressors[transgressors] were believed to make some atonement for their crimes. Remembrance haunted them even in sleep. Their miseries rose up before them, compassed them round, and urged them by invisible stripes into her track, “whose ways are ways of pleasantness, and all whose paths are peace.”
But over the impenitent wicked vengeance for ever impended; nor could wealth or rank purchase impunity, as the bare-footed friars and ass-mounters of the time were fain to persuade the credulous and weak-minded. Long withheld, the anger of the Gods descended at length in showers, utterly extirpating the evil-doers.[[1019]] Thus perished Paris, the violator of marriage and of hospitable rites; thus Clytemnæstra and Ægisthos, adulterers and murderers; thus the whole house of Œdipos, involved in an unutterable cycle of misery and crime. The interval, moreover, between the commission of guilt and its final punishment, was given up to the Erinnyes,[[1020]] those dire and mysterious powers of vengeance, whose breathless chace after crime is pourtrayed with so much sublimity by Sophocles. These divinities, starting into instant birth, whenever blood was unlawfully shed, walked perpetually beside the murderer to his grave,—to him alone visible, to him alone audible.
The gross and carnal-minded contrived, indeed, in the case of lesser transgressions[transgressions], to remain blind to this deformity, while youth and health and prosperity cast their illusions over their path. But age in this matter sharpened their sight. On drawing near the brink of the grave, the vices, hitherto so blythe and comely, appeared to grow more shrivelled and hideous and unlovely than their own impure countenances, and they would then fain have parted company with them. But, no! Having been comrades of their own choosing, Zeus chained them to their side to the last, unless repentance severed the link; and their fearful howlings, night and day, broke their repose, harrowed up their feelings, augmented tenfold their terrors, while sweat and tears, and agonising shrieks burst from them even in their dreams. The wicked, therefore, in the deepest darkness of paganism, were not left wholly to the error of their ways. But God reserved himself a witness in their hearts, and set up a light by which they might rightly, if they chose, direct their footsteps. It is true that the cardinal verities of religion were then but very imperfectly perceived, that, to get at them at all, men had to break through the shells of many fables, and that, when found, they must be for the most part enjoyed in secret, far from the din of ambition. Not, indeed, that the people refused their sympathy to virtue,—public opinion is never so far corrupted,—but that in the world there has always existed a strong current bearing men far from the track of duty and holiness.
There was, no doubt, some degree of fanaticism mixed up with all this. The priesthood, an order of men much calumniated, but without whom society would be worse by far than it is, found it necessary to allure men into the bosom of their church by imposing ceremonies, by sacrifices, and by the mysterious disclosure of certain truths in the performance of certain rites. It will be seen that I allude to the mysteries. On the occasion of initiation, as if to intimate that men cannot be virtuous or religious by proxy, each individual became his own priest and sacrificed[[1021]] for himself. But in what initiation itself consisted, no man knows. Antiquity has revealed nothing, and nothing can we discover. The hypotheses of scholars are, therefore, so many dreams, and a mere waste of ingenuity; for, if they should by chance hit the mark, there exist no means of proving that they have done so. But of this we are sure, that a persuasion was widely spread that a blissful immortality awaited the initiated. A greater degree of holiness was supposed to attach to them,—there was a spell shed around their persons,—in situations of danger they experienced less of the fear of death. In storms, for example, at sea, when the ship seemed about to sink—"Have you been initiated?" was the question men asked each other. Still, among philosophers, the wisest and best sometimes neglected this popular consummation of a pious life. Socrates belonged not to this communion, a circumstance which rendered it more easy to fasten upon him the charge of impiety, in those days more atrocious than now, since, to be esteemed inimical to the gods, was the surest way to make enemies of men. Further than this, it is not necessary that I enter into the gentile faith, which only incidentally[incidentally], as it affected morals, belongs to my subject.
But there exists in all countries a minor cycle of superstitions, which, more strongly perhaps than anything paints the peculiarities of the national character. In the north, as we know, this indigenous belief has survived all changes in the public creed, and will subsist to the last, lingering among our woods, our ruins, our moonlit meadows, our churchyards, by our firesides. Fairies, witches, ghosts, goblins can by no advances in civilisation be put to flight. They sail in our steamers on the ocean, ride at quickest speed along the railroads, go to bed with the first lady in the land, and even nestle beneath the statesman’s vest.[[1022]] With us these aërial beings, or spectres of crime, too commonly assume an aspect grotesque or devilish, but they nevertheless keep alive in the popular mind the spirit of romance and poetry, one of the never-failing handmaids of religion. Mythology rarely penetrates down to these primitive superstitions, which, however, constitute the basis of the whole science, and in Greece assumed, in many cases, forms of beauty analogous to its loftier and more poetic fables.
The place occupied in our own popular mythology by the “light-sandalled fays,” was in Greece filled by the Hamadryads and Nymphs.[[1023]] No wood or grove or solitary tree, no fountain or rill in moss-grown cell or rustic cavern, existed without its co-existent divinity, female generally, and instinct with beauty and beneficence. These creatures, the Jinn and Jinneh of the Arabs, extended their dominion over all minor streams, and sported, in the softness and stillness of night, athwart the billows silvered by the moon; but the deities of great rivers, as the Acheloös, the Peneios, and others, were male. Being only a few degrees raised above humanity, they were often enamoured of mortals, to whom they appeared arrayed in loveliness, amid the glimmering forests, at dawn or twilight, or when
“overhead the moon
Wheels her pale course.”
It was not always, however, that the love of a nymph proved a blessing. There were occasions when, having for a moment revealed their superhuman charms to some shepherd in his romantic solitude, or to some poet worshiping the muses alone, beside the inspiring mount or spring, they again capriciously withdrew, and left him vision-smitten to pine or, perchance, to die.