d people became convinced that they made man
better. The devout female votaries of Isis, whom Juvenal[50] pictures as
breaking the ice to bathe in the Tiber, and crawling around the temple on
their bleeding knees, hoped to atone for their sins and to make up for
their shortcomings by means of these sufferings.

When a new ideal grew up in the popular conscience during the second
century, when the magicians themselves became pious and serious people,
free from passions and appetites, and were honored because of the dignity
of their lives more than for their white linen robes,[51] then the virtues
of which the Egyptian priests enjoined the practice also became less
external. Purity of the heart rather than cleanliness of the body was
demanded. Renunciation of sensual pleasures was the indispensable condition
for the knowledge of divinity, which was the supreme good.[52] No longer
did Isis favor illicit love. In the novel by Xenophon of Ephesus (about 280
A. D.) she protects the heroine's chastity against all pitfalls and assures
its triumph. According to the ancient belief man's entire existence was a
preparation for the formidable judgment held by Serapis after death, but to
have him decide in favor of the mystic, it was not enough to know the rites
of the sect; the individual life had to be free from crime; and the master
of the infernal regions assigned everybody a place according to his
deserts.[53] The doctrine of future retribution was beginning to develop.

However, in this regard, as in their conception of the divinity, the
Egyptian mysteries followed the general progress of ideas more than they
directed it. {93} Philosophy transformed them, but found in them little
inspiration.

* * * * *

How could a religion, of which neither the theology nor the ethics was
really new, stir up at the same time so much hostility and fervor among the
Romans? To many minds of to-day theology and ethics constitute religion,
but during the classical period it was different, and the priests of Isis
and Serapis conquered souls mainly by other means. They seduced them by the
powerful attraction of the ritual and retained them by the marvelous
promises of their doctrine of immortality.

To the Egyptians ritual had a value far superior to that we ascribe to it
to-day. It had an operative strength of its own that was independent of the
intentions of the officiating priest. The efficacy of prayer depended