_, ii. 35):--

"Omne nefas omnemque mali purgamina causam
Credebant nostri tollere posse senes.
Graecia principium moris fuit; ilia nocentes
Impia lustratos ponere facta putat.
A! nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis
Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua!"

Such passages show that abuses existed, but also that it was felt to
be a scandal if the initiated person failed to exhibit any moral
improvement.

These different conceptions of the office of the Mysteries cannot, as
I have said, be separated historically. They all reappear in the
history of the Christian sacraments. The main features of the
Mystery-system which passed into Catholicism are the notions of
secrecy, of symbolism, of mystical brotherhood, of sacramental grace,
and, above all, of the three stages in the spiritual life, ascetic
purification, illumination, and [Greek: epopteia] as the crown.

The secrecy observed about creeds and liturgical forms had not much to
do with the development of Mysticism, except by associating sacredness
with obscurity (cf. Strabo, x. 467, [Greek: he krypsis he mystike
semnopoiei to theion, mimoumene ten physin autou ekpheugousan ten
aisthesin]), a tendency which also showed itself in the love of
symbolism. This certainly had a great influence, both in the form of
allegorism (cf. Clem. _Strom_, i. 1. 15, [Greek: esti de ha kai
ainixetai moi he graphe; peirasetai de kai ganthanousa eipein kai
epikryptomene ekphenai kai deixai sioposa]), which Philo calls "the
method of the Greek Mysteries," and in the various kinds of
Nature-Mysticism. The great value of the Mysteries lay in the facilities
which they offered for free symbolical interpretation.

The idea of mystical union by means of a common meal was, as we have
seen, familiar to the Greeks. For instance, Plutarch says (_Non fosse
suav. vivi sec. Epic._ 21), "It is not the wine or the cookery that
delights us at these feasts, but good hope, and the belief that God is
present with us, and that He accepts our service graciously." There
have always been two ideas of sacrifice, alike in savage and civilised
cults--the mystical, in which it is a _communion_, the victim who is
slain and eaten being himself the god, or a symbol of the god; and the
commercial, in which something valuable is offered to the god in the
hope of receiving some benefit in exchange. The Mysteries certainly
encouraged the idea of communion, and made it easier for the Christian