elevating and refining, there can
be no doubt, and that they served a high purpose is equally clear. No
one, who has read in the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius the initiation of
Lucius into the Mysteries of Isis, can doubt that the effect on the
votary was profound and purifying. He tells us that the ceremony of
initiation "is, as it were, to suffer death," and that he stood in the
presence of the gods, "ay, stood near and worshiped." _Far hence ye
profane, and all who are polluted by sin_, was the motto of the
Mysteries, and Cicero testifies that what a man learned in the house
of the hidden place made him want to live nobly, and gave him happy
hopes for the hour of death.

Indeed, the Mysteries, as Plato said,[46] were established by men of
great genius who, in the early ages, strove to teach purity, to
ameliorate the cruelty of the race, to refine its manners and morals,
and to restrain society by stronger bonds than those which human laws
impose. No mystery any longer attaches to what they taught, but only
as to the particular rites, dramas, and symbols used in their
teaching. They taught faith in the unity and spirituality of God, the
sovereign authority of the moral law, heroic purity of soul, austere
discipline of character, and the hope of a life beyond the tomb. Thus
in ages of darkness, of complexity, of conflicting peoples, tongues,
and faiths, these great orders toiled in behalf of friendship,
bringing men together under a banner of faith, and training them for a
nobler moral life. Tender and tolerant of all faiths, they formed an
all-embracing moral and spiritual fellowship which rose above barriers
of nation, race, and creed, satisfying the craving of men for unity,
while evoking in them a sense of that eternal mysticism out of which
all religions were born. Their ceremonies, so far as we know them,
were stately dramas of the moral life and the fate of the soul.
Mystery and secrecy added impressiveness, and fable and enigma
disguised in imposing spectacle the laws of justice, piety, and the
hope of immortality.

Masonry stands in this tradition; and if we may not say that it is
historically related to the great ancient orders, it is their
spiritual descendant, and renders much the same ministry to our age
which the Mysteries rendered to the olden world. It is, indeed, the
same stream of sweetness and light flowing in our day--like the fabled
river Alpheus which, gathering the waters of a hundred rills along