tral idea, if you can only discern it, is ever
the same. She no longer, indeed, looks with the bewildered gaze of her
childhood to the mountains and rivers, to the sun, moon, and stars, for
aid. In the fulness of time the veil is rent in twain, and she looks
beyond with a clearer eye to the surer signs that are visible of her
unspeakable glory. But the longing of her heart is ever the same.

What remains to us of ancient systems of faith is, for the most part,
mere name and shadow. It is even more difficult for us to realize to
ourselves a single ceremony of Grecian worship,--for instance, a dance
in honor of Apollo,--in its subtile meaning, than it would be to
appreciate the "Prometheus" of AEschylus. This ignorance leads oftentimes
to the most shocking profanation; and from mere lack of vision we
ridicule much that should call forth our reverence.

Thus many Christian writers have sought to throw ridicule upon the
Eleusinia. But we must remember, that, to Greece, throughout her whole
history, they presented a well-defined system of faith,--that,
essentially, they even served the function of a church by their inherent
idea of divine discipline and purification and the hope which they ever
held out of future resurrection and glory. Why, then, you ask, if they
were so pure and full of meaning, why was not such a man as Socrates one
of the Initiated? The reason, reader, was simply this: What the
Eleusinia furnished to Greece, that Socrates furnished to himself. That
man who could stand stock-still a whole day, lost in silent
contemplation, what was the need to him of the Eleusinian veil? The most
self-sufficient man in all Greece, who could find the way directly to
himself and to the mystery and responsibility of his own will without
the medium of external rites, to whom there were the ever-present
intimations of his strange Divinity,--what need to him of the Eleusinian
revealings or their sublime self-intuition ([Greek: autopsia])? He had
his own separate tragedy also. And when with his last words he requested
that a cock be sacrificed to AEsculapius, that, reader, was to indicate
that to him had come the eighth day of the drama, in which the Great
Physician brings deliverance,--and in the evening of which there should
be the final unveiling of the eyes in the presence of the Great
Hierophant!

Such were the Eleusinia of Greece. But what do they mean to us? We have
already hinted at their connection with the Sphinx's r