deities than in the customs in their honour,
may we perceive certain traces of oriental superstition. We recognise
the usages of the elder creeds in the chosen sites of their temples--
the habitual ceremonies of their worship. It was to the east that the
supplicator turned his face, and he was sprinkled, as a necessary
purification, with the holy water often alluded to by sacred writers
as well as profane--a typical rite entailed from Paganism on the
greater proportion of existing Christendom. Nor was any oblation duly
prepared until it was mingled with salt--that homely and immemorial
offering, ordained not only by the priests of the heathen idols, but
also prescribed by Moses to the covenant of the Hebrew God. [44]

XV. We now come to those sacred festivals in celebration of religious
mysteries, which inspire modern times with so earnest an interest.
Perhaps no subject connected with the religion of the ancients has
been cultivated with more laborious erudition, attended with more
barren result. And with equal truth and wit, the acute and searching
Lobeck has compared the schools of Warburton and St. Croix to the
Sabines, who possessed the faculty of dreaming what they wished.
According to an ancient and still popular account, the dark enigmas of
Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt;--the drama of the Anaglyph [45].
But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really,
at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are
asserted to have been--mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of
the connexion between the awful and the unknown--were found so
generally among the savages of the ancient world--howsoever dispersed
--and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is
indeed a wild speculation to assert that the oriental wisdom ever
wandered, that it is more likely that they were the offspring of the
native ignorance [46], than the sublime importation of a symbolical
philosophy utterly ungenial to the tribes to which it was
communicated, and the times to which the institution is referred. And
though I would assign to the Eleusinian Mysteries a much earlier date
than Lobeck is inclined to affix [47], I search in vain for a more
probable supposition of the causes of their origin than that which he
suggests, and which I now place before the reader. We have seen that
each Grecian state had its peculiar and favourite deities, propitiated
by varying ceremonies. The early G