II. of Macedon and his queen Olympias, parents of Alexander the Great,

underwent this initiation. There were Cabirian mysteries also in several other Grecian islands, and in several places on the continent, both in Greece and in Asia Minor. 6. THE MYSTERIES OF CRETE. In the island of Crete were celebrated the mysteries of Zeus. According to the myth, the father of the gods and lord of all the world, to foil the designs of his father Cronos, who had devoured all his other children, was, while yet a child, taken by his mother Rhea to that island for refuge, and there guarded in a grotto of Mt. Ida and nourished with milk and honey by the people, who meanwhile, by dealing blows on each other’s shields, kept up such a din as drowned the wailing of the babe. In Crete was also shown a sepulchre of Zeus. Regarding the Cretan mysteries we know this only, that in the Springtime the birth of the god was commemorated at the grotto and his death at the sepulchre, and that the while the young people (who represented the Curetae), in armor, with dance and song and with loud beating of cymbals and drums, enacted the story of the childhood of Zeus. 7. THE DIONYSIA. An ancient national cult among the Hellenes, into which a mystic element was imported from without, was the worship of Dionysos or Bacchus, i. e., of the sun as promoting the growth of the vine: its end was plainly to glorify the physical world, the material world, in all its manifestations of life and force. Hence the Bacchus cult is one predominantly materialistic, addressed to the sense of bodily pleasure, the appetite for food and the sexual desire; and yet, inasmuch as viticulture, like agriculture, is one of the factors of civilization, and as the Drama had its origin in these Dionysiac festivals, it cannot be denied that for many elements of our intellectual and spiritual culture we are indebted to this cult. Of the festivals of Dionysos some belonged exclusively to the popular religion, but others were connected with mysteries. Those of the former class had their chief seat in Attica, the others elsewhere. Of these non-mystic festivals of Dionysos in Attica there were seven, occurring in different months of the year, from the season of the vintage in Autumn till toward Spring, or while the new wine was in fermentation; and some of these festivals were held in the country, others in the city. On such occasions gymnastic sports of a ludicrous sort were carried on, as dancing on one leg, leaping on a leathern bag blown up with air and greased with oil outside, and trying to maintain equilibrium, etc. At the head of a procession composed of men and women of all ranks and degrees were borne the sacrificial implements, then followed the victim, a he-goat, and soon came the image of the Phallus, borne aloft with great pomp. So little did the Greeks possess of our peculiar sense of shame that they looked on this symbol as something entirely proper, not scrupling even to sing satirical verses about it. After the sacrifice came jesting, banter, travesty, and with travesty pantomime, in which was enacted the history of the god, including of course his fabled adventures. The stage had its rise in such festivals as these. The Spring festival, held in the month Anthesterion (month of flowers) was kept with special solemnity. It marked the time when the wine was racked off into the earthen pots. It was at this festival that the Basilissa (wife of the Basileus), accompanied by fourteen other women, entered the holy of holies of the ancient temple of Dionysos (at all other times women were forbidden to enter it), and there made a secret offering with mystic rites and vows. But we have the genuine “mysterium” in the Dionysia Trietera, or triennial festival of Dionysos. Festivals of this class seem to have originated in Thrace, and hence among a people of Pelasgian stock. The spirit of the Thracians, which was naturally of a gloomy cast, but when their slumbering passions were awakened became wildly enthusiastic, seemed in these festivals, or rather these transports of moral frenzy, to pass into the persons of the lighthearted and selfcontrolled Hellenes. The mad extravaganza of this phenomenon in the history of man and his ways is seen in the Grecian hero-myth, which tells of the great singer Orpheus and Pentheus, king of Thebes, being torn limb from limb by the furious Maenads at festivals of Bacchus, the former because after the death of his beloved Eurydice he never more would hear of woman’s love, and the latter because he had spied on the festivals. For these festivals were observed by women exclusively, who, drunken with wine, knew no restraints of reason or humanity: they were called maenades (madwomen) or Bacchae, and their festivals Orgia (orgies). The orgies were conducted on mountain sides or in mountain gorges at night under the light of torches, the fair participants, clothed in fawnskins, armed with the thyrsus wreathed with ivy and vine leaves, with hair disheveled, and, as the story goes, snakes tangled with its locks, or held in the bacchantes’ hands. This festival, which occurred in the mild midwinter of Hellas, the time of shortest days and longest nights, continued over several days, during which the maenads, shunning all association with the male sex, sacrificed, drank, danced, jubilated, made noise with the double-pipe and the brazen tymbal, nay, as the (manifestly improbable) story runs, with their own hands tore asunder the bull, symbol of the god, and destined to the sacrifice, and gloated over the victim’s bellowing for pain. This feat was to show forth the death of Zagreus, one of the forms under which Dionysos appeared, and in which he was torn asunder by the Titans because he had been chosen by Zeus for his successor as ruler of the universe. The flesh of the bull was torn in shreds with the teeth by the maenads and devoured raw. Then the raving Bacchae invented a fable about the death of their god, and how he was lost and how he must be found again. But all the anxious searching was vain, and hope was centered in the finding again of the all-quickening Springtide. The observance of the Dionysia was not marked with these extravagances everywhere: in Attica such excesses were never seen. But Athenian women would attend the secret festival on Parnassus near Delphi, heedless of the mantle of snow on the summit. 8. THE ROMAN BACCHANALIA. The worst disorders of Bacchus worship, as practiced in Greece, would seem to have been equaled, or even surpassed, in the Roman Commonwealth. The historian Livy (xxxix., 8–20) compares the introduction of the cult into the city and its rapid spread to a visitation of plague. According to Livy the cult was brought to Rome from Etruria. In its Etruscan and Roman form the worship of Bacchus was simply debauchery, under the thinnest possible cloak of religion. The festivals or orgies were at first observed by women; but a certain priestess of Bacchus, by command of the god, introduced the innovation of admitting men, and instead of three Bacchic festivals a year, instituted five festivals for each month; and whereas in Etruria the rites had been practiced in the day time, they now began to be held at night. From considerations of prudence the abominations of the Bacchanalia were guarded from public view by a hedge of ceremonial, and postulants for admission were required to practice for several days the strictest continence. But the term of probation being over, and the postulant admitted to the company of the Bacchanals, he or she found themselves surrounded by all conceivable incitements to the gratification of lust, in every way that the depraved instincts of man or woman had ever before, or perhaps has ever since contrived. According to Livy the Initiates of these mysteries numbered several thousand persons in the city, many of them belonging to the most distinguished families. In addition to the abominations of their secret meetings the Initiates were charged with conspiring against the commonwealth, with forgery of last testaments, with poisonings and assassinations, with the most revolting rapes. In the year 186 B. C. the Consul Spurius Postumius Albinus, having privately made inquiries into the doings of the sect, resolved to employ all the resources of the state for its suppression. The circumstances which led to this resolution were as follows: A youth of noble birth, Publius Aebutius, whose father was dead, was the ward of his stepfather, Titus Sempronius Rutilus. Now Sempronius had mismanaged the estate of Aebutius, and was unable to give an account of his guardianship, and therefore wished either to have the youth put out of the way, or to get him under his power. The easiest way was by debauching him in the Bacchanalia. Aebutius’s mother, devoted to her husband, pretended to the son that during his illness she had made vow to the gods to consecrate him to Bacchus in the event of recovery. Aebutius, nothing suspecting, told of this to one Hispala, a damsel of questionable reputation, with whom he had for some time been very intimate; but she entreated him for all the gods’ sake not to have anything to do with the Bacchanalia: that she herself, as maid, had been initiated with her mistress, and knew what shocking deeds were done in those assemblies. Having promised her that he would not seek initiation, he made his resolution known to his parents, and was by them turned out of their house. Aebutius made complaint to his aunt Aebutia, and by her advice to the Consul Postumius. The Consul summoned Hispala to his presence, and from her, not without difficulty, for she feared the vengeance of the sect, learned what she knew of the proceedings at the secret assemblies. Then he brought the matter before the Senate, who gave to him and his colleague, Quintus Marcius Philippus, full powers for the suppression of the evil. Rewards were offered for trustworthy testimony, measures were taken to prevent the escape of guilty ones, and there were numerous arrests. Seven thousand persons in all were implicated, and all Italy awaited the outcome of the prosecution intently and with alarm. The ringleaders and a multitude of their accomplices were put to death, others were condemned to imprisonment or were exiled. Aebutius and Hispala received a large money reward; and Hispala furthermore was admitted to all the rights and privileges of a Roman-born freewoman, without prejudice from her previous disreputable career. A decree of the Senate forbade forever the holding of the Bacchanalia in Rome or in Italy. The decree provided that if any one should consider such rites obligatory and necessary, or should think that he could not omit them without incurring the guilt of irreligion, he must lay the case before the Praetor Urbanus, and the Praetor must consult the Senate. If leave were granted in a senate having not less than one hundred members present, he (the person desiring to practice the worship of the god) might perform the rites, provided that not more than five persons were present at them, and that there was no common fund, nor any master of the ceremonies, or priest. All places sacred to Bacchus worship were ordered to be destroyed, “except there be here or there an ancient altar or consecrated image” of the god. But the prohibition of the Bacchanalia could not be kept in force perpetually. The abuses of the Bacchus cult went on unchecked outside of Italy, and by degrees sprung up again even on Italian ground, till they reached the pitch of absolute shamelessness in imperial times, as when the notorious Messalina, and other imperial strumpets, celebrated the most shocking orgies in the very palace. 9. DEBASED MYSTERIES FROM THE EAST. Near akin to the Dionysos cult, in many points coinciding with it, as well as with one another, and also, like the depraved forms of that cult, surreptitiously introduced from the Orient into Greece and then into Rome, we have the mysteries of the mother of the gods Rhea or Cybele, those of Mithras, and those of Sabazios—cults and deities that were finally grouped together by the Orphic sect, of which anon. Rhea was sister and spouse of Cronos and mother of the king of the gods, Zeus, whom she took to Crete, as we have already seen, to save him from his father’s violence. She is the Earth deified, like her mother Gaea, and is therefore often confounded with other goddesses answering to the same element, specially with the earth-goddess Kybele (Cybele), named after Mt. Kybelos or Kybela in Phrygia, who, according to Phrygian myth, when exposed by her father, King Maeon, was suckled by panthers and brought up by herdsmen, and afterward fell in love with the youth Attis (afterward Papas, both meaning “father”), of whom she exacted a vow of chastity as her priest. Attis having broken his vow for the sake of a lovely nymph, the goddess in her wrath deprived him of reason, and in his frenzy he castrated himself. The goddess thereupon ordained that in future all her priests should be eunuchs. There are countless other stories told of Attis and Cybele, but they nearly all agree in telling that Attis with manhood lost life also, and that Cybele, frenzied by grief, thereafter roamed about disconsolate and despairing. Like Dionysos, she was always followed by a long human and animal retinue (the moon with the starry host!), and rode in a wain drawn by lions, a mural crown circling her veiled head; while Attis was always represented as an ecstatically sentimental youth beneath a tree, with the Phrygian cap on his head and wearing white bag trousers. In Phrygia Cybele was worshiped under the form of a simple stone. The scene of her feats and sufferances was laid in gorgeous wildernesses, in fragrant groves, among the hillsides and glades known to the shepherd and the hunter. As in Dionysos we see the wild abandon of a jovial spirit, so in Cybele we have the recklessness of a soul weary of life; hence at her festivals all centred in the loss of Attis, and a pine tree was felled, because his catastrophe took place under a tree of that species. All this was accompanied by a hubbub of wild music, and the winding of horns on the second day announced the resurrection of Attis. In the ecstasy of joy the participants were seized by a wild frenzy. With shouts and cries, their long locks disheveled, and in their hands bearing torches, the priests danced and capered like madmen, roaming over hill and dale, mutilating themselves, even emasculating themselves (as the myth required), and bearing about, instead of the figure of the Phallus, the proofs of their compliance with the precept of the goddess. The cult of Cybele was for the first time formally organized as a mystic society in Rome, but the orgiast frenzy clung to it at all times. The processions did not move with measured steps and in orderly ranks, as those of other cults, but the Initiates ran in confused troops, shouting their religious songs, through hamlets and towns, armed with curved blades, tokens of castration. At Rome the priests of Cybele were called Galli, that is, cocks. In the time of the emperors purifications in the blood of bulls and rams were introduced, apparently in honor of the Springtide, when the sun enters the constellations Taurus and Aries, and the vegetable powers of nature reappear. That is the theme of all the ancient mysteries, and indeed of all mysticism from the earliest times to this day. In all of them the vicissitudes of the vegetal world, its sickening, decline, and death in the Fall, its new-birth and resurrection in the Spring, are allegorized into the sufferances, the death and the resurrection of a god. Out of this nature-cult are little by little developed the feeling of alienation of man from God, the quest for the god, the finding of him, and the consequent reunion, with the result of strengthening the assurance of the soul’s immortality. The excess of sensual delight found in the Bacchanalia, and the extreme renunciation of delights by the castrate ministers of Cybele, are only variations of one same theory of human life. Now, as this suffering godhead—which was the prime inspiration of all these sensualists and adventurers—was an importation from Thrace in the form of Zagreus-Dionysos, and from Phrygia as Attis, so was Mithras an importation from Persia. Among the ancient Persians Mithras was the light, conceived as a personality, and hence was the highest manifestation of the good god Ormuzd, while the darkness represented Ahriman, the evil god. Hence the worship of Mithras is worship of the light, and, therefore is the purest cult that heathendom could imagine; in the later times of the Persian empire Mithras worship was combined with sun-worship, and Mithras, as sun-god, found a place in the religion of European peoples. In those later times also came belief in a female deity called Mithra: but Mithra was unknown to the primitive Persians, and the name was a transformation of the Babylonian Mylitta, the moon-goddess. Of the existence of secret cults among the Persians we know nothing whatever, hence nothing about any mysteries sacred to Mithras. To the Greeks Mithras was unknown, but in the latter days of the Roman empire, among many mysteries those of Mithras made their appearance and even gained great pre-eminence, as is proved by numerous monuments still extant. These monuments all consist of representations in stone of a young man in a cave, wearing the Phrygian cap, in the act of slaying with a dagger a bull; all around are figures of men and animals, all symbolical of constellations, as the scorpion, dog, serpent, etc. The groups have been variously interpreted, but the most probable view is that the youth stands for the sun-god, who, on subduing Taurus (in May), begins to develop his highest power. The mysteries of Mithras, like their symbolic representation in the monuments, were celebrated in grottoes, and had for their original end worship of light and of the sun, and the glorifying of the sun’s victory over the darkness; but this lofty idea gave way, in these as in other mysteries, to vain reveries and subtilities; and in the corrupt age of the Roman emperors it had, in all probability, some very ugly developments, such as were seen in the Bacchanalia. The rites of initiation were more elaborate than in the Grecian mysteries. The postulants were subjected to a long series of probationary tests—eighty in all, it is supposed—which grew more and more severe till they became actually dangerous to life. Among the initiatory rites the principal ones were a baptism and the drinking of a potion of meal and water. Admission to the highest secrets was reached through several degrees, probably seven, each having its special ritual and its special doctrines. At times the Initiates were required to fast, and those of the highest degree were vowed to celibacy. Such abstinences were all unknown to the ancient Persians; on the other hand human sacrifices came in with Mithraism from the East, and, despite the decrees of the Emperor Hadrian, such sacrifices were offered in the Mithras cult. Commodus with his own hand immolated a man to Mithras, and his successors, in particular the monster Heliogabalus, carried the abomination farther, and made of the pure god of light a bloodthirsty Moloch. Nay, after the empire had been christianized, Julian the apostate consecrated in Constantinople a sanctuary to Mithras. But after the death of Julian the cult was forbidden in the empire (A. D. 378) and the grotto of Mithras at Rome destroyed. Coins were struck in honor of Mithras, and he was honored with public inscriptions in the words, Soli Invicto (to the unconquered sun); a festival also was instituted in his honor, called the Natal Day of the Unconquered Sun: it fell on December 25th and was publicly observed: the same day was in Persia New Year’s. In the monuments already mentioned, which commemorate the worship of Mithras, are seen inscribed alongside the neck of the bull the words “Nama Sebesio,” supposed by some to be a mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, and to signify Worship to the Pure; but in these words we have an allusion to a new god and his cult. In the latter Graeco-Roman time, when the mystery craze possessed all minds, a combination of Zagreus, Attis, and Mithras was made, and the result was dubbed Sabazius. The name Sabazius is given by sundry writers to various gods and sons of gods, and the word comes probably from the Greek verb Sabazein (to smash, break to pieces), indicating the wild disorder of this cult. Diodorus gives this name to the inventor of the use of oxen in ploughing, other authors confound Sabazius, as discoverer of the vine, with Bacchus. There existed in Greece a public and a secret cult of Sabazius, both resembling the Bacchic cult, with ludicrous dances, uproarious singing, and loud thumping of cymbals and drums. The orator Aeschines, rival of Demosthenes, was an enthusiastic Sabazist. At initiation into the Sabazian mysteries the postulant had snakes dropped into his bosom, was robed in fawnskin, his face daubed with clay, then washed in token of a mystic purification; he was now to exclaim: From evil I am escaped and have found the better. There was much hocuspocus and absurd jugglery withal, but the real object was to give opportunity to Initiates of both sexes to indulge in the most shameless gluttony and lewdness. The priests of this cult were the most impudent of mendicants. Aristophanes exhausted on Sabazius, the “trumpery god,” all the resources of his caustic sarcasm. And thus in time, as Grecian philosophy began to undermine the thrones of the Olympian gods, and to banish the phantoms of the netherworld, and the educated people to look on the fair forms of the world of gods as fictions of imagination; simultaneously the mysteries began to be stript of the glory of a heavenly origin, and it was seen that their rites were not only of the earth earthy, but as time went on, that they were become mischievous: yet the Initiates, lost to all shame and all moral sense, persisted nevertheless in their sacred hypocrisy, till heathendom as a whole had passed out of the bloody, hideous night of the gods. _PART THIRD._ _The Pythagorean League and Other Secret Associations_. 1. PYTHAGORAS. The mysteries so far considered had for their foundation the worship of the gods. They were accessible only to the initiated; but candidates for admission were not carefully selected; and in Athens anyone of fair repute was eligible for initiation into the Eleusinia. Nor do we discern in the mysteries any “end” aimed at—any idea to be realized, any thought to be embodied in action. From all that we can learn with certainty regarding the mysteries, their object was either simply to illustrate or interpret certain ideas (such as we have already characterized) by means of elaborate ceremonies; or—in their state of decay and degeneration—to minister to unbridled sensuality. For this reason we cannot regard the mysteries we have been studying as true “secret societies,” for the distinctive note of such societies is that they make a special selection of their members, and have a specific aim. The earliest historic instance of such a secret society is afforded by the Pythagorean League. The great philosopher Pythagoras was a sort of Grecian Moses or Jesus, a Messiah to whom were ascribed supreme wisdom, far-reaching plans, ideas of worldwide reform; who proclaimed new ideas, quite unknown in the previous history of his nation, and preached a new system of nature and of life; who gathered around him disciples that swore in his words and pursued peculiar ends disconnected from the interests of this world; who on that account was, with his disciples, persecuted, prisoned, and martyred for his principles, by a world which deemed itself outraged; and whose history, because of its extraordinary character, became deeply incrusted with fable and fiction, till at last there was left only a figure in which, if not quite impossible, it is certainly difficult, to decide how far it conforms to the truth. Pythagoras was born in the island of Samos B. C. 580, or, according to some authorities, 569. He is represented as of distinguished presence and imposing stature. That he possessed uncommon intellectual power is shown by his scientific discoveries and by his wonderfully organized discipleship. Even in his youthful years, it is related, he busied himself with his favorite sciences, mathematics and music, the mutual relations of which and their mutual influence he is, in fact, believed to have discovered. His years of study ended—of them we have no definite knowledge—his years of travel followed. And whither should a man in his day, athirst for wisdom, direct his steps if not to the land of wonders on the Nile, where the veiled image at Sais sat enthroned, and where the mystic silence of the priests suggested to the visitant treasures of knowledge hidden in their temples? Whether the counsel to visit Egypt came from Thales, first of Grecian philosophers to seek the land of Nile—tradition, which gives the glamour to everything, likes to bring renowned men together; whether Polycrates, tyrannos of Samos, commended him to his friend the Pharao Amasis—of this we have no certainty, though the thing is not improbable, for the chronology is consistent, especially when we bear in mind the discrepancies between authors as to the year of Pythagoras’s birth: at all events, Pythagoras voyaged to Egypt. The serious difficulties he met with on the part of the priests of Osiris, then not so complaisant as they afterward became, we have described already when giving account of the Egyptian mysteries. By hook or by crook he obtained, whether at Thebes, Heliopolis, or elsewhere, we know not, indoctrination in the theology of the One God. But of what avail could that be to him? His countrymen had already fashioned their own ideas of the divine nature. They based their theology on nature and spiritualized nature: the Greeks knew nothing of an impassable gulf yawning between god and world; for them these two were bound together and pervaded each other: to such a people one could not preach an “architect of the universe.” Pythagoras, therefore, fain would communicate to the Greeks of the Egyptian wisdom whatever seemed adapted to their use; and he the more willingly complied with the Initiate’s oath to observe lifelong silence regarding what he had seen and heard in the temples, as his countrymen would not have understood even a monotheism specially designed for them. For the Greeks the intimate association between god and universe was not only an idea, it was flesh of their flesh, bone of their bones: it was gloriously immortalized in the imperishable masterworks of their architecture and sculpture, and surely Grecian sculptors must not go to school in Egypt to learn how to carve cows’ horns and hawks’ heads. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the one god must necessarily have impressed the mind of Pythagoras deeply: he must have recognized therein a profound philosophy, though it may not have satisfied him completely; and hence it was his task, as it was the task of Plato and of all other Greeks initiated in the Egyptian mysteries, to expound the doctrine of the one god according to Grecian ideas—to couple Oriental wisdom with Grecian fancy. The traditional story represents Pythagoras as tarrying in Egypt when the Persian king Cambyses conquered the country, and tells how that tyrant had the Grecian philosopher deported, with other captives, to Babylon, where Pythagoras became acquainted with Zoroaster, and to his knowledge of the Egyptian wisdom now added a mastery of the wisdom of the Persians. Pythagoras was undoubtedly contemporary with Cambyses; but the time of Zoroaster is so undecided that the story must be regarded as fiction. When he returned to his native Samos, purposing to set up as a master, he found to his chagrin that independent science is a plant that does not thrive under tyranny, and, compelled by force of circumstances to change his abode, he settled in Magna Graecia—Southern Italy. On the eastern coast, in what became afterward Calabria, were two Achaean cities, Sybaris and Crotona. Pythagoras intended at first to make his home in Sybaris, but Sybaris could be no congenial home for such a philosopher. Crotona afforded a more promising field for his work, and there the labors of Pythagoras before long were abundantly rewarded. The Greeks ever were eager for novelties (novarum rerum cupidi), and whoever brought anything new was welcome. As yet, philosophy was a thing unknown among the Crotoniats; therefore they received its apostle with gladness and enthusiasm. Pythagoras commenced by giving public lectures in the council hall; as these awakened more and more interest every day, the philosopher was employed by the authorities to give counsel to the citizens; he then established a school, thus adding to his public functions the duties of a private instructor. Pythagoras used three agencies in his work, viz., his Doctrine, his School, and the League instituted by him. The Doctrine of Pythagoras holds a distinct place among the philosophic systems of the Greeks. With regard to the opposition existing between the spiritual and the physical, and the uncertainty and obscurity that reigns as to the relations between them and the true constitution of each, the doctrine solves all difficulties by the theory that Number is at once the form and the substance of all things. All things consist of Numbers, corporeal elements as well as spiritual (mental, or intellectual) forces, and henceforth Pythagoras’s philosophy became mathematics. But the silly tricks with numbers that occupied the ingenuity of later Pythagoreans possess no interest for us. It is probable that the master contented himself with the undeniable fact that the matter and essence of things rest on mathematical relations—a view of great profundity, considering the age in which the philosopher lived. To Pythagoras and his school are credited the distinction of numbers into even and odd, the decimal numeration, square and cubic numbers, as also the famous Pythagorean theorem, the triumph of geometry. Pythagoras brought music into closest relation with mathematics. As in numbers he recognized the most perfect “harmony,” so he must needs regard harmony of sounds as a necessary part of the harmony of numbers. By this association he became the discoverer of our present scale of seven musical notes—the octave. But his idea of harmony found most perfect embodiment in the universal creation, and in astronomy he was the first to surmise that the earth does not stand still, but has a revolution around a centre; hence, that it is not the principal existence in the universal frame of things, that all things do not exist for its sake, that Earth is not twin sister of the Heavens. True, Pythagoras had no idea, nor could have in the then existing lack of astronomical instruments, how the heavenly bodies were related: that was the discovery of Copernicus and Kepler. He took for the mid-point of the universe a “central fire” out of which were formed all the heavenly bodies—this the seat of the power that sustains the world, the centre of gravity of all things. Around this central fire revolve the “ten” heavenly bodies—farthest off the heaven of the fixed stars, then the five planets known to antiquity, then the sun, moon, earth, and lastly the “counter-earth”, which revolves between the earth and the central fire. Revolving along with the earth, the counter-earth is always interposed between the earth and the central fire: light comes to the earth only indirectly, by reflection from the sun. When the earth is on the same side of the central fire as the sun we have day; when it is on the other side, night. Thus, Pythagoras may be said to have surmised a central sun, though his theory did not contemplate the actual sun as that centre. He was also the first to explain the vicissitudes of the seasons by the obliquity of the earth’s axis to the ecliptic. Further, he discovered the identity of the morning and evening star. His school held the moon to be the home of fairer and larger plants, animals, and human creatures, than those of earth. In accordance with his doctrine of harmony he ventured to express the bold idea that the heavenly bodies by their movement produce tones which together constitute a perfectly harmonious music—the music of the spheres. We do not hear this harmony, being so wonted to it. Nor did he fail to apply to the soul of man this doctrine of harmony. By harmony the opposition between reason and passion was to be reconciled. But as this consummation is never to be achieved as long as soul and body are tied together, the sage of Samos regarded this union as a measure of probation, destined to endure till man shall have made himself worthy of liberation from the same; and when he fails of this during his span of life, then his soul must migrate through the bodies of other men and animals till it shall become worthy of leading, in a higher region of light, an incorporeal life of purity and perfection. His disciples, furthermore, cherished the fantastic idea that the master was able to recognize in another body the man whose soul had transmigrated into it. That Pythagoras himself ever pretended or believed that he himself was in his fifth metempsychosis, or that he was son of Apollo, or that he had a golden hip, or a golden thigh, are either ridiculous extravaganzas of imaginative disciples or the sarcastic stories of his enemies. But noble and beautiful are the conclusions which he draws from his doctrine regarding purity of life, namely, the moral precepts which he laid down for the attainment of the supreme end. They required an absolutely stainless life. Pythagoras enforced the duty of reverence toward parents and the aged, fidelity in friendship, strict self-examination, circumspection in all our acts, patriotism, etc. Further, his disciples were required to be cleanly of body and cleanly in attire; they were to abstain from all “unclean” food, especially fleshmeat, and from intoxicating liquors, and hence to live on bread and fruits only, but beans were an exception to this rule; for some not fully explained reason beans were an abomination to the Pythagoreans. And that which was unfit as food was unfit also as matter for offerings to God: for the god our philosopher reverenced was a god of light and purity. His clear intellect rejected polytheism, though what his view of the unity of godhead was we know nothing save that his faith was an eminently pure and exalted one. 2. THE PYTHAGOREANS. The life of Pythagoras was devoted entirely to his School and his League. The School was the seedfield or seminary of the League, and the League was the practical application of the School’s teaching. Thus the School was preparatory to the League, whose members were educated in the School. Pythagoras enjoyed the boundless reverence of his disciples: when they wished to assert any proposition as indisputably true, they would say, He himself said it (Gr., autos ephe, Lat., ipse dixit). And this reverence for the Master increased as in time the School was changed from an open institution to a secret one. For at first everybody, even the most learned and most eminent of the citizens, attended the lectures of the Philosopher. Those who were simply hearers of the lectures were called Acusmatics (akusmatikoi). But those who were of proper age for receiving a further education, and who had leisure to devote themselves to learning, were afforded opportunity for pursuing higher studies under the personal direction of Pythagoras, and were known, not as simple Hearers, but as Students, or Mathematici. These were the nucleus of the Pythagorean sect. This class of disciples having grown considerably in numbers and influence, it became possible for Pythagoras, helped by the contributions that flowed in, to erect for his academy a special building, or, rather, group of buildings, in which he and his disciples might live secluded from the influences of the outerworld. This institution, called the Koinobion (coenobium, place where people live in community) was a world in itself, and embraced all the conveniences of plain living—gardens, groves, promenades, halls, baths, etc., so that the student did not regret the hurlyburly of the world without. Henceforth the Acusmatici, or Acustici, were no longer persons of all classes and degrees, admitted to attend the lectures, but the newly admitted pupils, who received instruction in the elements of the sciences, and were preparing themselves for the higher studies. They had to observe strict silence and to yield blind obedience, and were not permitted to see the Master’s face: at the lectures a curtain screened him from view. The advanced students were admitted behind the screen, and hence were called esoterikoi (esoterici, insiders): those before the curtain, exoterikoi (exoterici, outsiders). To gain admission to the esoteric class a pupil was required to spend from two to five years in study, and then had to undergo severe tests. If a student failed to answer the tests he was rejected: but if he passed successfully, he was no longer required to observe silence and to be content with listening only: he might now see the Master face to face, and under his direction might pursue a study chosen by himself, as philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, music, etc. Gymnastic exercise was practiced diligently, and was made the cornerstone of the Pythagorean therapeutic, which for the rest was a science of dietetic. These approved and tested students formed the core of the celebrated League, which, in conformity with the division of the pupils in the School, comprised Exoterics and Esoterics. The Esoteric members of the League were, no doubt, the students admitted to the higher classes, as well as the graduates of the school: probably the number of these never exceeded 300. But to become an Exoteric member of the League, anyone was qualified who was a follower of the Philosopher, and who was ready to live according to his teaching and to spread the knowledge of the doctrine abroad: of these there may have been several thousand. Their mode of life was left to their discretion, while, on the contrary, the Esoterici were bound by strict rules. They lived in the Coenobium, always wore clothes of white linen, washed and bathed daily in cold water, at their common board abstained from the meats and drinks forbidden by the Master, and put in practice his doctrine. They divided the day among their various duties, meditating, mornings, how they might employ the hours most profitably, and evenings questioning themselves how their good resolutions had been kept. Harmony, that foundation-idea of the Pythagorean doctrine, was the lodestar of their lives. They studied to be just toward all men, toward the erring strict and kindly, faithful to friends and yokemates, to the law submissive, toward the unfortunate charitable, temperate in their pleasures; to keep their plighted word, and in their behavior to set a good example to all men. The League is said to have comprised several sections, but whether the sections were “degrees” rising one above another, or whether they were co-ordinate branches, is not clear. We hear of Mathematici, who devoted themselves specially to the sciences, of Theoretici, who were professors of ethics, of Politici, concerned with government, of Sebastici, whose province was religion. The religion of the Pythagoreans seems to have been compounded of doctrines of the ancient popular religion of the Greeks, of the mysteries, and of the monotheism of the Egyptian priests; and it had a secret cult, with elaborate ceremonial of initiation, the purpose of which, however, was to enforce the teaching of the Master. The political principles of the Pythagoreans favored a transformation of the Dorian oligarchism into an aristocratism of culture. Democracy they hated. Their aim was to acquire for themselves powerful influence in the state, to fill the public offices with their own members, and to administer government according to their Master’s ideas. As matter of fact, they appear to have attained these ends fully or approximately in Crotona, Locri, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other cities of Magna Graecia. There is no doubt that the secrets that the Pythagoreans were sworn to keep had reference to these political aims. To bar out the uninitiated the members are said to have had a badge, a five-pointed star (pentagrammon, pentalpha) and to have employed a symbolic form of speech, by means of which they concealed their secrets under cover of apparently trivial words, or words not to be understood by outsiders. But the League of the Sage of Crotona, after a glorious, though brief, ascendency, had a tragic end. The cities of Magna Graecia had grown rich by commerce, and with wealth and ease had come great corruption of manners. In Sybaris the lower classes of citizens—artisans and shopkeepers—rose in revolt, and five hundred patricians were banished, their property seized by the people, and the popular leader Telys administered the government in their stead. The exiles took refuge in Crotona, and there, according to Grecian custom, sitting around the altar in the agora, or market-place, implored the aid of that city, then ruled by the Pythagoreans. Thus for two reasons the rulers of Crotona were objects of hate to the tyrannos of Sybaris: they were the enemies of democracy, and they were protectors of the exiled oligarchs. He, therefore, demanded of Crotona surrender of the fugitives. The demand having been refused (at the urgent instance of Pythagoras it is said), war followed. A desperate battle was fought, and the Crotoniats, though inferior in number, were victorious (510 B. C.). Sybaris fell into their hands, and was looted without mercy, and the town leveled with the ground: in fact, a stream was made to flow through the once magnificent city. This atrocious deed, which though no consequence of Pythagorean teaching, was nevertheless a consequence of Pythagorean exclusiveness and Pythagorean contempt for the people, had its nemesis. The democratic spirit, so mortally offended, took an equally atrocious revenge. In Crotona, too, as before in Sybaris, the democracy took action, and demanded a division of the conquered Sybarite territory among all the citizens of Crotona, and equal suffrage for all in the election of the rulers. At the head of the democracy stood Cylon, an enemy of the Pythagoreans. The aged Master, because of the hostility manifested toward him personally, was obliged to flee from the scene of his great labors. It is supposed that he died at Metapontum, hard on a hundred years old. In Crotona the strife of parties went on. The government unwisely rejected the demands of the democrats, and thereupon, about the middle of the fifth century B. C., the storm burst. The rage of the oppressed and despised people was vented first upon the Pythagoreans, a great number of whom were assembled in the house of Milo. The house was taken by storm, the assemblage butchered either on the spot or in flight, and their property distributed among the people. Aristocracy was also overthrown in Tarentum, Metapontum, and Locri. The Pythagorean League was annihilated, and its religious and political labors disappeared, leaving no trace. 3. THE ORPHICI. The scattered fragments of the Pythagorean League attached themselves to another association, that of the Orphici, named after the fabled singer Orpheus. This curious association, a fantastic compound of the mysteries and Pythagorism, is rightly credited to Onomacritus, apostle and reformer of the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries, who lived in the time of the Athenian tyrannos Pisistratus: he was high in the favor of Pisistratus, and enjoyed much celebrity. By some of his contemporaries, men of sense and not easily imposed on, he was suspected of palming off his own compositions for poems of Orpheus (who never existed); but probably he did this without intent to deceive, but simply because of his irresistible passion for the mummery of secret societies and mysteries. This adventurer and mystic, who understood very well the meaning of the mysteries and the uses to which they could be turned, was one of the first to speak out the thought hidden in them: that man was born in sin and fallen away from God, and that he cannot be saved till grace shall be afforded him. His doctrine was just Pietism, with this exception, that instead of “the lord Jesus” we have here the god Dionysos, or the Iacchos of the mysteries, or Orpheus. Such inane babblement as this, and such doctrines as that the soul of man is confined in the body as in a prison, that the world is for it a vale of tears and a place of banishment, that it is pining and longing to return to its true home, Heaven, are an offense to the joyous spirit of Greece, an outrage against her religion of beauty, truth, and virtue, the last blow dealt at Grecian art and science. The outcome of them was a tedious, voluminous “Orphic literature” consisting of mythological poems full of mysticism and sentimentality. The Orphic societies were not, like the mysteries, great assemblages of people in temples, but, after the Pythagorean pattern, secret schools or clubs; and they followed, at least ostensibly, the Pythagorean rule of life, abstaining from fleshmeat, beans, and wine; but with this they coupled two cults in themselves incompatible, that of the ideal god Apollo, and that of the sensual deity Dionysos. But being stript of the semi-public and official character attaching to the mysteries, and of the philosophic dignity of the Pythagorean sect, the Orphic societies became simply nests of swindlers and mendicants; and vagabond priests, Orpheotelestae, admitted to their ridiculous degrees, for a consideration, every credulous aid marvel-gobbeting postulant; there were even victims who had themselves with wife and children initiated every month. Other tricksters combined the Orphic cult with the Phrygian cult of Cybele, mother of the gods, and with that of Sabazios: these were known as Metragyrtae (mother-beggars) or Menagyrtae (monthly beggars). These and their like were regular mountebanks, giving out that they had the power of curing the insane, their method being to dance and caper around the patient to the sound of timbrels, the while flagellating themselves: for this they took up a little collection. One of these metragyrtae was capitally punished at Athens in the middle of the fifth century B. C.: but the judges, seized by remorse, questioned the oracle, and got response that in atonement they should build a temple to the Great Mother: thereupon the followers of the dead juggler were set free. A priestess of Sabazios, Ninus by name, was also put to death for brewing philters: she was the one sole victim of witchcraft trials in all antiquity. Thus did the Orphic sect in Greece degenerate to the same low estate as the mysteries, despised by all honest and enlightened men. But both the mysteries and the Orphic as well as Pythagorean societies were links in a chain of phenomena that reached all through Grecian antiquity, indicating plainly a reaction against the popular religion, and an effort to introduce essentially different religious views—views which in aftertimes, in an improved form, were to triumph definitely over the Olympian gods. 4. MYSTERIOUS PERSONAGES OF ANCIENT TIMES. In antiquity we are able to distinguish three religious systems, viz., polytheism, monotheism, mysticism. The first was a deification of nature: and as nature manifests herself in various forces, the religion, too, had to postulate a multitude of deities. This is the system of the Oriental and Graeco-Roman popular religion; and in these its two branches it is again differentiated by the fact that on the one side it assumed a gloomy, awe-inspiring character, while on the other side it wore a joyous aspect, inviting to mirth and pleasure. The second system rested on a total separation of God from nature, and thus it acquired a monotonous, one-sided character of abstruseness, without any feeling for form and beauty: it was the system of the Egyptian priests and of the Israelites, and in after times passed over into Mohammedanism and some Christian sects as Unitarianism, etc. The third system also postulated the separation of God and nature, but it was not a definitive separation, for there was hope of a reconciliation; it consisted, therefore, in a sense of alienation from God, and in an incessant longing for reunion with him. This system found embodiment in the Grecian mysteries and the Pythagoreo-Orphic societies, and later in “positive” Christianity: it was neither absolutely polytheistic nor absolutely monotheistic, but compact of these two systems, in that it contemplated many gods embraced under one form, or one god manifested in sundry forms. Even in the myths underlying the Eleusinian mysteries we have a conversion of the gods, especially Demeter and Dionysos, into human form and a resurrection and ascension of Persephone; an important part was played in the same mysteries by the bread and wine employed for religious purposes, by the purifications in water, and by the fasts observed; in the Bacchic mysteries Orpheus, Zagreus, and others appear as suffering and dying demigods; in the Orphic rites there is allusion to the natural sinfulness of man, and to grace and redemption; in the mysteries of Cybele sexual continence is commended as highly meritorious; in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean sect, even as in Christianity, the bodily life is regarded as an evil, an incorporeal immortality of the soul as true bliss, stress is laid on the soul’s delights, and on the punishment of the wicked, whereas, in polytheism the soul after death is but a shadow; and many are the other points of contact between those systems and Christianism, which, being of a more general nature, have not yet been mentioned in these pages, for example, certain mysterious and enigmatical personages who have remained hitherto quite unnoticed, except by the learned. Commonly schools and the books give information only about the officially recognized Olympian gods, and perhaps the gods of sea and netherworld; but the “Best God,” in Greek Aristaios, is passed over in silence, just because one knows not what to make of him. This Aristaios passed for a son of Apollo the god of light. Held apart from the “scandalous chronicles” and naughty gossip that was in circulation around the rest of the gods, he was represented as inventor of sheep-husbandry, bee-keeping, the production of oil from the olive, etc., as man’s helper in drought and aridity, practicer of leechcraft (like his brother Aesculapius), subduer of the winds, originator of rites, laws, and sciences. As the little vogue of his name would indicate, he was less honored on the Grecian terra firma than in the Hellenic islands and colonies, and there ofttimes was joined with the father of the gods, as Zeus-Aristaios (particularly in his role of protector of the bees), with the god of light as Aristaios-Apollon, with the god of fertility as Aristaios-Dionysos. In the island Ceos he was the most highly reverenced of all the gods. Thus we see in Aristaios a conception of one almighty, allwise god, transcending all the conceptions of polytheism, and all the gods in human form worshiped by ancient Greece. Now plainly Aristeas and Aristaios are one same name. Among the ancient Greeks there was a mythical personage named Aristeas. He was Apollo’s priest, as his paronymus was Apollo’s son. According to Herodotus (IV. 13–15) Aristeas was of Proconnesus, an isle in the Propontis (sea of Marmora), son of Castrobius; in the sacred trance received the inspiration of Apollo, journeyed into Scythia (north of the Black Sea), and died in his native place, in a fulling-mill. The place having been closed after his death, a citizen of the neighboring town of Cyzicus who happened to be passing, declared that he had just before met Aristeas in that town and spoken with him. The mill door was then opened, but no trace of Aristeas was there. Seven years afterward he appeared again in Proconnesus, there composed poems on his journey to Scythia (which Herodotus read), and disappeared a second time. But 340 years later he was seen at Metapontum, in lower Italy, where he ordered the citizens to erect to Apollo a statue with his name; then he disappeared for good. On questioning the oracle at Delphi what they should do, the burghers of Metapontum were counseled to obey the precept of Aristeas; which they did. Herodotus saw the statue surrounded by laurel trees. This “Best of Men,” ever reappearing, and anon disappearing, without leaving any vestige of bodily presence, is no doubt evidence of a pre-Christian need of a son of god rising from the dead and ascending into heaven; as far as it goes, it is also an argument for the reality of resurrection from the dead and for the union of the divine and human. But not only occurrences which call to mind the Christian Son of God, but even his very name appears in Grecian antiquity; and indeed the name antedates the occurrences. Homer (Odyssey, V. 125), and Hesiod (Theogony 969) mention Jasion or Jasios (names closely resembling the Hebrew Joshua and Jesus), a son of Zeus, who had a sister Harmonia, and who with the goddess Demeter (the earth, or fertility) produced out of a thrice-plowed field Plutus (wealth): meaning that the discoverer of husbandry became discoverer of thrift. But in punishment of his sacrilegious love of a goddess Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt, yet at the same time assigned him a place among the gods. As beloved of the Eleusinian goddess, Jasios, after initiation into the mysteries by Zeus himself, became the indefatigable herald of the mystic doctrines. Says Diodorus (V. 49): “Wealth is a gift imparted through the intermediation of Jasios.... It is known of all that these gods (Demeter, Jasios, and Plutos), when invoked amid dangers by the initiated straightway offered them help; and whoso hath part in the mysteries, the same will be more devout, more upright, and in every respect better.” Thus does Jasion figure as son of the highest god, as himself raised to divine honors, as a wandering apostle of religion, and as the source of all good fortune. His name is equivalent to “savior,” “healer,” being from the same root as iatros (healer), and the verb iaomai (to heal, cure). Compare Iao, the Greek form of the Hebrew divine name Yahve or Jehova; also Iacchos, and Jason (i. e., Iason). Thus in mystic Hellenism we find the basic ideas of the later system of divine incarnation and human deification, of redemption, etc.; and there can be no doubt that we must seek in the Grecian mysteries for one of the sources of Christianism. _PART FOURTH_. _Son of Man. Son of God._ 1. HELLENISM AND JUDAISM. If one attends solely to the fact that the founder of the Christian religion was a Jew, and that not only he executed his mission in Judea, but took Judaism for the basis of his teaching, the assertion made in the preceding section, viz.: that the sources of Christianism are to be sought in the Grecian mysteries, may appear singular. But the apparent contradiction disappears at once when we reflect that long before Christ’s day Judaism was thoroughly yeasted with Grecian elements; and that after his death the work of propagating his system was done far more largely by Greeks and men of Grecian education than by Jews. We will not only prove that this was so, but also will show that the Christianism of Christians is at root and in substance a totally different thing from the Christianism of Jesus. Sharper contrast can hardly be than that between the Grecian and the Jewish character. On one side closest union between God and world: on the other, widest divulsion; on one side most untiring research and the finest sense of art-form: on the other only theology and religious poetry; on the one side a priesthood that makes no pretension, and has little or no influence: on the other a nation ruled by priests; the Greeks maintaining an active commerce with all the world, their ships traversing the seas, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the remotest angle of the Euxine: Judea sealed against all access from without, against every ship that touched at Joppa, against every caravan from the desert; in Greece eager seizing of everything new and readiness to reject what is antiquated: in Judea holding fast to what is old and mistrust of all change. These fundamentally different elements were fated to come in mutual contact. Ever since their liberation from Babylonian captivity by the decree of Cyrus, the Jews, both those who remained in the region of Euphrates and Tigris and the small number of them who returned to the native land, had lived under the Persian sceptre, and therefore after the conquest of Persia by Alexander, were exposed to the powerful influence of Grecian culture. The Jews were scattered still more in consequence of the wars between Alexander’s successors: soon they were to be found in every port and every isle of the Mediterranean as far as Spain; on the edge of the Asian and African deserts; and after this dispersion (in Greek, diaspora), they became a shopkeeping or mercantile race. But nowhere outside Palestine were they so numerous as in Egypt and its splendid new capital, Alexandria, seat of Grecian art, literature and learning. They enjoyed large privileges in Egypt; and they erected at Leontopolis a temple, after the model of the temple at Jerusalem. But though the Jews of the Diaspora, thanks to their laws regarding foods and the Sabbath, their possession of the Scriptures, their undiminished reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem, and the obligation laid on every Jew to pilgrim thither once at least, remained most firmly attached to the religion of their fathers, nevertheless in many places they adopted the language (usually Greek) of the locality in which they lived, so that a special “Hellenist” synagogue had to be erected at Jerusalem for the sake of visiting Jews who understood only Greek. But nowhere did Jews adopt the Grecian customs and language so unreservedly as at Alexandria, and it was there that between the years B. C. 280 and 220 the Pentateuch was translated into Greek. This translation still is styled the Septuagint (Latin, Septuaginta, Greek, Heptekonta, both meaning seventy), in accordance with the old fable that in the work were employed seventy-two translators, being six from each of the twelve Israelitish tribes; and that while each of the seventy-two translated the whole of the five “books of Moses,” the several versions agreed verbatim, literatim, punctatim. In later times the remainder of the Hebrew Bible was translated (about 125 B. C.). In Alexandria scholars who were not Jews found in the Septuagint an introduction to Jewish theology; the Hellenist Jews, from their acquaintance with the literature of Greece, became conversant with Grecian philosophy. Greeks began to admire the wisdom of Moses, Jews to study Plato and Aristotle; and the enlightened polytheism of the one concurred with the monotheism of the others, in developing a new mysticism. In this mysticism of the Alexandrines it was that the idea of Divine Revelation had its origin—an idea before unknown, but now suddenly taken up by these enthusiasts, and applied, on the one side to the Old Testament, and on the other side to the Greek philosophers. The Jew Aristobulus, founder of this school of thought, by means of an allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, traced to that source all the wisdom of the Greeks; and Philo, greatest of the Jewish philosophers, contemporary with Jesus, though he knew nothing of his life or doctrine, so spiritualized the tradition of his race as to see in the four rivers of Eden the four cardinal virtues, in the trees of Paradise the other virtues, in the patriarchs and heroes of Israel only personifications of various moral conceptions: all in the Grecian manner. According to Philo, before he created the world, God made a world of ideas, which found its centre of unity in his Word (logos); the corporeal world was made after the model of this ideal world. The logos was God’s first work, the world his second: this passed afterward into the gospel called of John: “In the beginning was the word,” etc. He understood the history of man’s creation to mean that the first human creature was immortal, ideal, perfect, but that by the creation of woman he was made sinful, imperfect. Philo took the idea of immortality from the Grecian philosophy rather than from the ancient Jewish doctrines; and with Pythagoras he regards the soul’s union with the body as a punishment. He therefore taught that man should free himself as much as possible from this burdensome association, that is, should despise sense and live entirely in the thought of God, that so he might obtain release. One should think such views are inconsistent with the laws of man’s nature, and so in truth they are; but nevertheless in Philo’s day there existed a society that aimed to fashion their life in accordance with these opinions. 2. THE ESSENES. Such a society was the order or sect of the Essenes, who traced their origin back to high antiquity, but whose doctrines really were first put forth about the year 100 B. C. The Grecizing Jew Josephus makes them a “third party,” standing between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But the Essenes, as such, had nothing to do with the political questions at issue between the two principal parties. The Essenes constituted a secret society. The name, Essenes, Essenii, is of unknown derivation. But as they practiced the healing art they got the name of Therapeutae (healers, physicians). Josephus says that they lived in special settlements in the country parts; Philo, that they lived in the hamlets, avoiding the cities; Pliny the elder plants them on the western shore of the Dead Sea, in settlements apart. Their number is stated at 4,000. Their occupations were husbandry and handicraft, but they sternly refused to have anything to do with whatever served the uses of warfare, as the manufacture of arms; they also declined all trades engaged in for individual profit, as traffic, seafaring, innkeeping. They had no private property, but community of goods; among themselves they neither bought nor sold, but each to each gave according to the need. They repudiated not alone servitude, but mastery in general, and whatever in anywise annuls the natural equality of mankind. Their food was such as necessity required, and was prepared strictly according to the rules of the order. On this point we know with certainty only that they held oil in abomination, whether for anointing or for use with victuals. But from the circumstance that they condemned bloody offerings and always practiced great abstemiousness in food, we must infer that they abstained totally from fleshmeat and intoxicating liquors. Sexual love also they condemned, and a party among them (the leading party), abstained from marriage and maintained its numerical strength by adopting outside children; another faction, however, deeming this strictness to be fatal to the sect, retained the institution of marriage, though under severe restrictions. The members observed the most scrupulous cleanliness, taking the bath daily in cold water, and wearing white garments. Their daily tasks were minutely prescribed. Before rise of sun they spoke no word, only the prayers, in which they paid honor to the sun as symbol of God. Then they went about their work, coming thence back to the common meal, first washing themselves and putting on clean garments. No one tasted anything till the priest had made prayer. The meal concluded, they offered prayer in unison, laid off their clean garments, and went back to work. At the last meal of the day the same customs were observed: at meat only one person spoke at a time. They did nothing without orders from the superiors, practiced moderation in all things, studied to control the passions, to be faithful to all obligations, to be at peace among themselves and with all the world, and to be helpful to the poor. There was a twelve-month term of probation prior to admission into the order. During that time the postulant conformed to the Essenian rule of life: he received a small hatchet (borne by all Essenes, as an emblem of labor), a loincloth for the bath, and a white gown. If the result of probation was satisfactory, a second term of probation (two years) followed; if found worthy, the postulant was admitted to membership. The rite of admission consisted of a meal in common, preceded by the pronouncing of the vow by the new brother. The tenor of the vow was that he obligated himself to be ever faithful to the rules of the order and to lead a virtuous life; to observe secrecy regarding the doings of the order and the names of members: this with reference to the world without; but with regard to the society itself, to keep nothing secret from the brethren. After admission, the Essenes were classed in four degrees. Unworthy members were expelled—a terrible punishment, indeed, for the outcasts were not released from their vow, and yet could not in the world comply with it; and so were doomed to perish. Their religious views have been already stated in part. With Judaism their only bond of union was in their practice of sending to the temple at Jerusalem offerings; but by reason of their condemnation of bloody sacrifices they were self-excluded from the temple. Nor was their belief in immortality of Jewish origin, for they held that soul, formed of most tenuous aether, is attracted and appropriated by a body, within which it lives as a prisoner; but that after liberation through death it soars to heaven, where it lives for evermore in a blest land, without rain, or snow, or heat, while the wicked are tortured in a remote region of cold and darkness. This recalls the views of the Pythagoreans. Less honorable to the Essenes are the frauds practiced by many of them in pretending to read the future, to interpret dreams, to conjure disease away, etc. Of later Christian notions we are reminded by the Essenian nomenclature of the angels, and the obligation imposed on new members to keep the names secret. The Essenian order survived till the early days of Christianism: it then died out, the Christian asceticism having made it superfluous. 3. CHRISTIANISM. Essenism is one of those phenomena which make but a small figure in general history, but which have mighty results, and which reconcile contrarieties in human nature. For in Essenism we have the middle term between the Grecian mysteries and Christianism, as also between the Grecian philosophy and Judaism. As appears from what has gone before, the Essenian society was a Judaic imitation of the Pythagorean league, and that league, again, represented in philosophy what the Grecian mysteries represented in religion, namely, humiliation of man by showing him that there exist higher powers that far transcend humanity; and then the elevation of man by inculcation of the thought of immortality and of future union with the Creator. With this mysticism was associated, in Greece, the lofty morality of a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle; and in Judea the belief in One God. The combination of all these elements could have but one result, to wit, to call forth that great power which transformed the world—Christianism. This new power was bound to arise, to reconcile contraries that confronted each other in that time, after the Roman Empire had brought under its universal sway the lands that had cradled all the diverse religions and philosophies. Those religious and philosophical systems were no longer, as before, separated: brisk inter-communication favored by the commerce and the wars of the vast empire, brought them daily into contact. The result was twofold: first, a certain indifference for religious opinions, the diversity of which gave men occasion to judge that in supersensual things no direct knowledge is possible; and the mischief of it all was that nothing was done for the education or enlightenment of the people, and, in fact, science existed only for the higher orders, and the people found no substitute for their ancient belief. But secondly, the result also was that people began to be conscious of the feeling, implanted by the Grecian philosophers, and particularly by the Stoics, that in spite of national and religious differences, all men are brothers, and that mankind is one great whole. However beautiful and noble this idea, it had to lie dormant so long as no bond of spiritual kinship save that of political unity held together the peoples who within the empire jointly obeyed one law and one will. This missing bond of spiritual union could not be other than a religious one; for so long as the sciences were so undeveloped no other spiritual guidance but that Godward could lead all hearts, however educated, of whatever nation, to the one end toward which men were being forced by the consciousness that, above all, they were men. And if it be asked what sort of a religion that must be which shall satisfy all nations at once, first of all it is very clear that it could be no polytheistic religion. That form of religion had outlived its usefulness. The various national religions—Egyptian, Chaldaean, Syrian, Grecian, Roman—had completely exhausted themselves in the production of deities: polytheism could give forth no more new shoots, as was shown by the fact that the Romans, all the forces of nature having been worked up, had gone and made goddesses of the virtues, e. g., Pudicitia, Concordia, Pax, Victoria, and the rest, had no recourse but to admit to their Pantheon all the gods of the conquered nations, and paid now to Isis, Cybele, Mithras, and Baal the same worship as before they had paid to Jupiter and Juno. Into such disrepute had polytheism fallen in the estimation of all educated men, who if they were persons of serious character despised such gods; but if they were frivolous, ridiculed worship and sacrifice and oracles and priests. The priests themselves smiled when they met, and by their irregular lives and their superstitious practices forfeited all respect. At last every honest man must have been transported with indignation when the emperors in the paroxysms of their despotic frenzy had themselves worshiped as gods and a race of hounds in human form burned the incense of adulation before them. Hence, the new religion for which mankind sought, to give true expression to the sentiment of a common humanity, could not be any of the heathen systems. Rather, by insisting on the oneness of Godhead, it had to make an end of polytheism, of godmaking, and of Olympian wantoning, and at the same time, of scorn and derision of the gods. Thus, then, what was wanted was a god who should have vanquished all other gods, and he a god of definite outline and fixed character—no nebulous, lackadaisical, inert deity such as the Grecian philosophers preached: no abstract “world-soul,” signifying nothing to the uneducated people; but a god like unto man himself, and whom man should have “made after his own likeness”; one with human feelings, sentiments, and passions, with human wrath and human lovingness. And this god must stand for a doctrine of personal immortality to the end the precious Ego of every man might have infallible and trustworthy assurance that his title to a Mansion in the Skies will stand unchallengeable for ever and for ever. And again, this god must be no abstract entity, alleged to have existed somewhere, somewhen, but a personality associated with definite localities, and possessing very definite traits. And so the problem was to find this one god, this doctrine of immortality, to find a personality that would be the middle term between the two. Nowhere was a monotheism to be found save in Judaism, and there it was plain and open to view. We have already seen how the Jews were scattered all over the world. Their synagogues were everywhere, and (noteworthy fact) they had proselytes in every large city, especially in Rome. In this we see the first steps in the dissemination of monotheism: but it could not be propagated on the large scale by Jews. Few were the persons who took a liking to the strictness of the Mosaic religion, and the God of the Jews was too spiritual a being to be grasped; besides, very many turned away from Judaism because of the indefiniteness of the Jewish notions of immortality, or the strange rites and the peculiar usages of the Jewish people. From Judaism, then, the idea of monotheism was the only feature that could be borrowed: what was demanded else was the mystic element; that is to say, men wanted a system of religious conceptions that would reflect back upon them their own sentiments as the infallible truth. But the material best fitted for that end was to be found in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean and Essenian doctrines. The diverse ideas of the several secret leagues with regard to the separation of the divine from the human and their reconciliation, must find their unity in the Jewish God—a thing not difficult to accomplish in the times immediately preceding the advent of Christ, because of the intermingling of Grecian and Jewish ideas: and this unity had to be established by some personage of imposing figure on the stage of history, who should impress his seal upon it and surround it with the prestige of deity. Now, at that time there was both among the heathen and the Jews an expectation of some such divine intervention as this. Thus, in the early years of the Roman Empire the belief was widespread that a new kingdom was to be founded in the East, and that a new Golden Age was about to begin. More definite was the expectation entertained by the Jews of a Messiah to come, who would restore the kingdom of Israel, and the worship of Jehova. This longing of the Jews coincided with the desire of heathendom for a new religion to take the place of a dying and degenerate polytheism. 4. JESUS. At this juncture appeared Jesus. He lived and died in obscurity. Of his career not one word of mention is found in contemporary Greek and Roman writers, eagerly as they investigated everything. But this obscurity wrought no detriment, for it left those who were longing for a new religion free to make of him whatever they thought best for their cause; that is to say, they made of him a personality very different from what he really was. Out of a circumcised son of a Jewish carpenter, who rose, indeed, above the bigotry of his people, and who suffered death for his revolt against the rule of priests and scribes, was developed the longed for Messiah. He was no longer merely human, but the Son of God, born of a virgin; a thaumaturge; his death was formally and intentionally a sacrifice for the “redemption” of mankind; after death he rose again, and then ascended into heaven: in a word, Jesus the man had become a god. And thus on the Jewish branch were grafted quite unjewish, Graeco-mystical shoots till the branch was no longer recognizable. We thus have in the life of the founder of the Christian Church, as handed down to us, two elements, truth and fiction. The element of truth is whatever is consistent with historical research and psychological fact and nature’s laws; and the element of fiction comprises whatever is in conflict with these. Jesus himself never pretended to be more than a man. Virtue was the burden of his teaching, and he never propounded a creed. To the many names of God he added that of “Father”—father of all mankind. He was no dogmatist, but a moral reformer, and as such occupied common ground with the Essenes and with John the Baptist, though he differed from them, and particularly from the Essenes, with regard to methods and measures: the Essenes would save men’s souls by withdrawing them from human society; Jesus sought to save men living in the world—to save human society itself. Jesus taught the people in parables, enforcing his doctrine of virtuous living by the use of similes that no hearer could fail to understand. Those who afterward essayed to write the history of his life and work, in like manner made a free use of figurative language, and the personality of Jesus was glorified, and his “mission” magnified till the world saw in him, indeed, “the desired of all the nations,” the Messiah longed for by Israel, the reconciler of the divine and the human, toward whom all the mysteries had pointed. The miracles of Jesus, namely, acts and occurrences that contradict the laws of nature, are not actual events; for as they are recorded in the New Testament they show a needless abrogation of natural law—needless, because the truths which Jesus preached could not be made more true by miracles. And thus, as the rationalists of the 18th century explained them as actual occurrences indeed, but yet as in accordance with the natural law, so now they are held to be quite needless juggleries altogether unworthy of Jesus. Hence the rational interpretation of the miracles is, that they represent the effort of the evangelists to portray the life and person of the Master in such colors as their notions of his supereminent dignity required. We divide these miracles into three classes—the miracles of the birth, the life, and the death of Jesus. The birth of Jesus, as narrated in the gospel story, is itself a miracle. The legitimate son of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, and of Mary—for such he was, according to the genealogy found in Matthew and Luke—had to be transformed into the Son of God, nay, made God himself, if his doctrine was to appear as of divine origin. Of types of such transformation there was no lack in heathendom. The first Christians, it is true, knew nothing of the sun-god Buddha, born again of a woman, but they were acquainted with Grecian and Roman mythology. Apollo, himself a god, walked on earth as a shepherd. Herakles, son of Zeus, and Romulus, son of Mars and of a virgin, were founders of states and cities, and progenitors of nations; then why should not the founder of a religion and of a church be also son of God and of a virgin? Nay, why might not God himself walk on earth in human form? That such was the actual origin of the story of the Divine Birth is not doubtful: all the rest is mere embellishment—as when the angel announces to the virgin the coming birth of the Son of God; when another angel, accompanied by the heavenly hosts, tells the shepherds of his actual birth; when a star conducts the “wise men of the East” to the wondrous babe, and they, with the shepherds and Simeon and Anna, pay him homage; and when Herod, purposing to take the life of the predestined Messiah, in order to compass that end orders the slaughter of the innocents. The miracles of the life of Jesus are either abrogations of natural laws, or cures of diseases, or resuscitations from the dead, or apparitions. All these different kinds of miracles are fictions with a purpose. We have already seen how in the Grecian mysteries bread and wine were employed as consecrated viands for the gods, and how at Eleusis divine honors were paid to Demeter and Dionysos as givers of bread and wine. Jesus, too, had to be made lord and giver of these two sacred viands: hence the change of water into wine, and the multiplication of the loaves; and later, in the last supper, bread and wine were made the object of the Christian Mysteries. The walking on the waters of the lake of Gennesareth, the stilling of the winds, the blasting of the fig tree, the finding of the penny in the fish’s mouth, and Peter’s draught of fishes are pictures of the imagination designed to show the power of the Son of God over the waters, the air, the world of plants and of animals. So, too, his power over bodily diseases is made something real for the common understanding by such stories as the healing of paralytics, lepers, the blind, the deaf and dumb; over mental diseases by the freeing of the possessed, over death itself by the raising of the dead. Among the apparitions we reckon those of the Holy Spirit as a dove at the baptism of Jesus, of Satan at Jesus’ temptation, and of Moses and Elias at the transfiguration: this is all allegory. The “Holy Spirit” is an idea distinct from God only in thought; the dove is the symbol of purity and gentleness. The Devil is a personification of evil, and the failure of his attempt was the triumph of the good. As for the transfiguration, that typifies the vast superiority of the new law over the old: the old must do homage to the new. The miracles of Jesus’ death, viz., the darkening of the sun, the rending of the veil of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the resurrection of the dead, were occurrences quite inomissible at the death of a god; they betoken the mourning of nature and of religion. But the miracles that followed his death, the resurrection and the ascension, together with the apparitions of the Crucified in the mean time, were imagined purely and plainly to confirm the belief in an everlasting redeemer and in the personal immortality of each individual one of the faithful. Of far greater importance than the miracles of Jesus are his teachings, and in particular his fine discourse on the mountain, also his beautiful parables. But his utterances contain nothing that is essentially new, the same thoughts having been often expressed by religious teachers and sages of other times and in other lands; and yet they possess a charm all their own, by reason of their unassuming simplicity. It was not the doctrine of the unity of God and of love for the neighbor that wrought the propagation of his teachings—the Jews possessed that doctrine already; nor was it his call to a higher life than that of sense—the Grecian philosophers preceded him in that respect; nor his alleged divinity, nor the miracles ascribed to him—his contemporaries in every land had had experience of miracles in every shape: it was the forcefulness, the grandeur, the simplicity of his discourse, speaking to the heart of man and mastering it, and calming its unrest. Here he was self-based and individual, supreme and irresistible. His teaching, and in particular the sermon on the mount, is the most emphatic, blistering condemnation of those who, for the last nineteen hundred years, have called themselves not only Christians, but the only Christians; who, nevertheless, in open contempt of their supposed Master, not only take oaths, and require an eye for an eye, cherish mortal hate for their enemies, trumpet their almsgiving abroad, offer their prayers aloud at the street crossings, fast ostentatiously, lay up for themselves treasures on earth, which are eaten by the moth and the rust; serve two masters or more, see the mote, though blind to the beam, throw the holy thing to the dogs, when one asks them for a loaf give him a stone, do not unto others as they would that others should do unto them: who not only do all this, but who even enact laws which oblige men to do all this. He whom they hypocritically call Master, but whom they never have understood, were he to appear among them, would anathematize them in the noble words, I know you not. Depart from me, ye doers of evil! Such language was unheard before his day; therefore wondered the people, for he spake with power, and not like the scribes and pharisees. 5. THE EARLY CHRISTIANS What, then, is the difference between the Christianism of Jesus and the Christianism of Christians? The former, as seen in the discourses of the New Testament, and above all in the ever beautiful sermon on the mount, is a simple and unpretending, yet world-transforming doctrine of God, Virtue, and Love of Man: a monotheism borrowed from the Jews for the behoof of all men, but purified of ceremonialism, sabbatism, sacrifices, high-priesthood: in short, the Christianism of Jesus meant the coming “Kingdom of God,” in which the virtuous man would enjoy happiness and peace. But the Christianism of Christians is a Mysticism ingrafted on this monotheism, comprising the dogmas of the Incarnation, Atonement, Redemption, Resurrection, and Second Coming, and the Miracles invented to buttress these dogmas. The Christianism of Jesus fell when he and his first disciples died: they had no hair-splitting theology, only a devout heart: that system was too simple, too unadorned, too little flattering to sense and to man’s vainglory to cut any figure in the world. But the Christianism of Christians, which had for its mother the Grecian mysteries, borrowed from Jesus, its father (without whose personality and name it never could have lived at all), what little was known concerning him, but swaddled it in a thick wrappage of mystic dogmatism. Let us see how this dogmatic Christianism succeeded in erecting itself upon the simple ethic-religious system of Jesus, and in making itself a power in the world by evolving new mysteries. Were it not for the grafting on it of the Graeco-mystical elements, Christianism would never have grown to be even a church, to say nothing of its prospects of becoming a power in the world. Its adherents in the beginning were good, zealous, believing folk, but among them were no men of education or of commanding ability. The first congregation in Jerusalem, therefore, unable to comprehend the lofty views of the Crucified, took their stand on a narrow ground not essentially different from that of Judaism; for example, they held that no one was worthy to be baptized who would not first undergo circumcision, thus becoming by adoption a Jew. The Apostle James, a devout ascetic, was the head of this school, the adherents of which were called Jewish Christians. The first to demand repudiation of Judaism was Stephen, a man of Grecian education; but he paid the penalty of his ambitious plans by a martyr’s death. The congregation at Antioch adopted Stephen’s view, according to which the “Gentile Christians” and the “Jewish Christians” stood on an equality. The intellectual leader of the Gentile-Christian school was Paul, a man who, in talents and in force of character, stood high above all the original apostles of the Nazarene. Through Paul’s exertions Christianism overstepped the narrow limits of Palestine and Syria. Well schooled, both in Grecian philosophy and Jewish theology, he was at the first a fanatical persecutor of the Christians, but had a sudden conversion while journeying to Damascus on a persecuting raid, and thenceforth was a zealous apostle of the new religion. Being a victim of epilepsy, Paul had frequent fits and visions, and he spoke of them often, thus implanting in the minds of the Christians a firm belief in such occurrences. Of course, the way was thus made ready for the introduction of the legends of a resurrection, an ascension, etc. Furthermore, a foundation was in this way laid for a great theological superstructure, which very soon was seen to rise. As the foundation, so was the superstructure—mystical. Over against the first man, Adam, representing the sensuous life, sin, servitude, and death, Paul set up the God-man Christ, representing the spirit, grace, freedom, and life; man was to crucify the “old Adam,” and to be born anew in Christ, even to become one with him. By this union, he said, the law of Moses is done away, being superseded by “faith,” whereby alone the sinner is justified and made worthy of God’s grace. For true faith, he added, carries with it good works, and the true believer cannot be otherwise than righteous. Paul thus stood, in a certain sense, on the Protestant ground as contradistinguished from the Judaeo-Christian (which is partly also the Catholic) ground of Peter, James, and John, who upheld the Mosaic law, and received into the Church only circumcised converts. Peter wavered, being a Jew among Jews, but often forgetting the Mosaic law in the company of Gentile Christians; but Paul would never consent that Gentile converts should be obliged to conform to the Jewish rites: hence Paul was the real founder of the Christian Church, which, had his opponents been victorious, would have remained a Jewish sect. The Church was split into two parties. To the Jewish-Christian party adhered the numerous converts from Essenism, with whom the tie of blood was stronger than the spiritual bond which united them with the school of Pythagoras. This party did not regard Jesus as God, but classed him with the angels. Between the two parties, Judaeo-Christian and Gentile-Christian, arose a third party, that of the Alexandrine Christian Jews. Their leader was Apollos (properly Apollonius), of whom it is related in the Acts of the Apostles, that he recognized only the baptism of John, and not that of Jesus, but that he was converted to belief in the latter by certain of Paul’s disciples at Ephesus. He it was that imported into Christianism the Alexandrine doctrine of the Logos or Word. 6. THE NEW TESTAMENT. With such a distribution of parties, the New Testament literature arose. It may now be affirmed without hesitation that not one piece of this literature was composed by any of the disciples of Jesus, who were all uneducated men. The early Christians had at first no Sacred Scripture other than the Old Testament; with regard to the doctrine of Jesus they depended on oral instruction. Even the language in which the New Testament was written, the Hellenistic (or literary dialect of the Alexandrines) is proof that it was the work of men of Greek education. As far as can be determined now the earliest New Testament writer was Paul. The Pauline epistles that are his indisputably, are those to the Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians; the most dubious among them are the epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. There are epistles of some of the other apostles, as James, Peter, John, and Jude, and these, of course, according to the party stand of their writers, represent views opposed to those of Paul. They are of later date than Paul’s epistles, and are hardly to be credited to the apostles whose names are prefixed to them. To the Alexandrine school is to be referred the epistle to the Hebrews, distinguished from the Pauline writings by the fact that it holds the Old and New Testaments to be, not opposites, but complements of each other. Apart from the Epistles the Revelation of John (Apocalypse) is the oldest book of the New Testament. Written in the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, it expresses the indignation of a Jew against the Romans during the siege and shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem, A. D. 70; it contains the prediction that not Jerusalem, but the whore of Babylon (Rome), together with the entire heathen world, will perish amid fire, blood, and ruin; but that there will be let down from Heaven a new and glorious Jerusalem, abode of the blest, seat of the “bride of the lamb.” After the destruction of Jerusalem the Apocalypse was written anew by an unknown hand, in the Christian sense. As every one knows, the prophecies of the book did not come true; but its fantastic, morbid imaginings have ever since been interpreted by enthusiasts as infallible forewarnings of things to come; and many a searcher of its pages has lost what modicum of sense they ever had in working out its meaning. The other historical writings of the New Testament consist of four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It is now evident that, when in the course of time the oral traditions were committed to writing, Jesus’ discourses, which, with an admirable simplicity and admirable clearness, expressed a good deal in a few words, must have been handed down in far more authentic form than the history of his deeds; and that among his discourses, those which contained truths of general application were more faithfully remembered than those which expressed personal views—as, for example, those in which he claims to be Messiah. The oldest written accounts of his life and work are lost to us forever; they were, without doubt, written in the language which was used by Jesus and his disciples, Aramaic, a sister tongue of Hebrew. Of the existing Gospels, written in Greek, the first three, called “synoptics” (i. e., agreeing), are based on one older original gospel or account; the third Gospel, John’s, stands by itself. The new criticism regards Mark’s Gospel as the most ancient: it contains almost exclusively narratives of facts, written down from memory, with the accruing embellishments and modifications; but Mark gives little of the discourses of Jesus; he says nothing, knows nothing of any supernatural birth of Jesus, and regards him simply as man. Mark’s Gospel is the basis of the other two synoptics, which draw on him for narrative, while they both add the discourses. The Gospel according to Matthew gives the discourses a Judaeo-Christian tinge; that according to Luke (who also wrote the Acts) a Gentile-Christian coloring: but they both waver between the opinions that Jesus is God and man, and that he is only man. But the Gospel literature was lifted out of this state of hesitation by the fourth Gospel. This Gospel bears the name of the Judaeo-Christian apostle John, but erroneously, for it had its origin in the Alexandrine school, and was written probably A. D. 160 to 170. The Alexandrines, as we have seen, were wont to resolve all accounts of facts, whether real or fictitious, into mental concepts, and, therefore, lived in a cloudworld of ideas. Whereas, the first apostles regarded the Nazarene merely as man, and while for Paul and the evangelists Matthew and Luke he was a god-man, the Joannine Gospel makes him God, and represents his existence on earth in palpable human form, as a mere passing incident. Hence it proclaims him the “Word” (logos), which Philo Judaeus discovered; which Logos not only was “in the beginning” with God, but was God himself. For the author of the fourth Gospel the narrative of occurrences in the life of Jesus is a secondary matter, serving only as a setting for his own peculiar doctrines. Thus the doctrine of the godhead of Jesus is the result of Grecian influence. Besides these four generally received Gospels several others, in one place or another, at one time or another, have passed for revealed writings. They are written, some in Aramaic, some in Greek, some in Latin, and, since their uncanonical character was decided, have been classed as Apocrypha. Their contents, barring a few passages that show some elevation of thought, are mostly in the jejune and tasteless vein of those trivial accounts of miracles which we find in the canonical Gospels, such as the changing of water into wine, the cursing of the figtree, Peter’s draught of fishes, etc.; or they are of a still more paltry sort, and tell of a number of miracles wrought by Jesus in his childhood. There are also apocryphal Acts of Apostles, apocryphal Apocalypses, and apocryphal Epistles, all of them what we should now call “pamphlets” composed in the interest of parties in the church. But the “Word” of the Joannine Gospel became the password for the reunion of all parties. The influences that had brought thousands of Gentiles into the Church were all too strong for the resistance of the Judaeo-Christian party to overcome. The little Judaeo-Christian fold had no choice, therefore, but either to go back to Judaism or to become Gentile Christians—unless they were ready to suffer excommunication by the latter. Only small fractions of the Jewish-Christian body held out as sects apart, while the union of the ever-multiplying Gentile Christians, now styled the “Catholic” church, unchurched the “heretics,” and set up the “new law” in opposition to the old, as its own inviolable foundation. Thus came into being the present collection of New Testament books, the “Church Catholic” having, about the end of the second century, separated the apocryphal from the canonical Scriptures. But still for a long time the character of individual books was in dispute, and John’s “Revelation,” together with several of the Epistles, was till recent times regarded by different persons or parties as apocryphal. To the decrees of councils and popes alone is it owing that there exists to-day a canonical collection of Scriptures, and that the books of the Canon are held to be inspired. 7. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CHURCH. In this wise was Christianism developed out of the secret associations of the ancient world. The early Christians themselves were, while under persecution, in a certain sense a secret society. Their worship possessed an essentially mystic character. It was not so from the beginning. In Jesus’ teachings there is not one word about divine service or cults; his surviving disciples knew of no other cult than the Jewish, and they assembled for “breaking bread” in their houses without any parade. Not until the Christians had been excluded from the synagogues were distinctive rites developed among them. There arose among them prophets whose inspired words were the principal feature of the religious service. Psalms were sung, not yet in the grand, impressive melodies of the Middle Age, but in “the long-drawn, partly nasal moaning tones, still usual in Eastern lands—tones that defy all musical harmony.” Besides, men then “spake tongues,” or at least uttered “heaven-storming words” pell-mell in the heat of enthusiasm, which no one, speaker or hearer, could well understand; and men “prophesied,” especially about the end of the world, the too slow oncoming of which caused much wonderment in those days. All these stupidities, by degrees, gave way before the efforts of strong-willed men like Paul. The “words in meeting” and the Lord’s Supper (or Love Feast), fell into the background, and the supper came to be simply a souvenir of the Saviour’s death, and at last was developed into a sacrament possessing the character of a “mystery;” i. e., a performance that must remain inscrutable to men, though it was men that contrived it. Baptism was associated as a sacrament with the supper, and the mysteries were multiplied. We have already seen how the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection arose, namely, out of the necessity of giving to Jesus the stamp of deity, for without that Christianism never would have attained a commanding place in the world. How to these mysteries, by the purely human decrees of the Nicaean Synod, the supreme and most incomprehensible mystery of all was added, the mystery of the Trinity; how, because of the impossibility of coming to agreement regarding this, the Church Catholic was split into the Roman and Greek, or Western and Eastern churches; how in the Western Church the bishops of Rome achieved supremacy; all this belongs, not to the history of the mysteries, but to the history of the Church. _PART FIFTH._ _A Pseudo-Messiah. A Lying Prophet._ 1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA. Great must have been the amazement of the Greeks when of a sudden, in different localities within the broad Roman Empire, communities arose which announced the suffering and dying God Jasios as the savior of a new age—a Jasios who, under the form of a Jew, all unknown outside his own country, had but lately been crucified; whereas, Jasios, as all Initiates of the Eleusinia and of the mysteries of Samothrace well knew, was ages and ages before slain by the thunderbolt of Zeus. And still populations were passing day after day over to the crucified Jew, the Son of God, the wonderworker, who rose from the grave, who went up to heaven. And, in consequence of his teaching, though, after all, that did but complement the teaching of a Pythagoras, a Socrates, a Plato, the noble statues of the Grecian gods were falling from their bases. Ought the Beautiful to fall in order to make room for the Good? Might not both stand side by side? And if a son of God and a thaumaturge was required, might not one be found without making of Zeus the Thunderer a victim to that fearful Jewish Yahve of Mt. Sinai? And such a son of God and wonderworker they found. The heathen prophet Apollonius of Tyana was a contemporary of Jesus, and was deeply venerated. And, as it chanced, a certain learned Greek, Flavius Philostratus, wrote a heathen gospel of the life of this Grecian saint, not as one hostile toward the Christians, nor as one who would prove their doctrine false, but with intent to come to the aid of decaying heathendom, and prevent for a time its overthrow by Christianism. To attain this end there must be no mention of Christianism or its author, so that Olympus might tower again in all its ancient glory and triumph over Sinai and Tabor. Philostratus composed his work, as he states, out of the notes of a disciple of Apollonius, one Damis, native of Ninive, by order of Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor Septimius Severus. What part of his work consisted of matter drawn from Damis’s notes, and what he added out of his own fancy, we can never determine. But he showed true insight in making out his hero to have been a Pythagorean. He therefore represents Apollonius as deriving his wisdom indirectly from the most ancient mysteries, those of Egypt, and from the venerated Grecian sacred leagues. Apollonius was born in Tyana, a town in Cappadocia. Previous to his birth, says Philostratus, the god Proteus appeared to his mother and told her that the child soon to see the light was the God himself. This happened in a meadow, where, after gathering flowers, she had fallen asleep, while swans gathered round her and intoned their song. When the child was grown up he became a strict observer of the Pythagorean rule of life, abstaining from fleshmeat and wine, and wearing linen garments. His abode was a temple sacred to Aesculapius, god of healing. Unworthy offerers of gifts to the god he drove out, and healed such of the sick as repented of their transgressions. He rejected the Grecian mythology as fabulous, preferring far to it the fables of Esop, and his only prayer was addressed to the sun. He refused to take possession of an estate inherited from his father, and imposed on himself a silence of several years’ duration. During his extensive travels he always lodged in temples, corrected abuses in the conduct of the divine service, couched his teachings in brief sentences, gathered around him disciples, of whom one was false and a traitor; sided with the persecuted and righted the wrongs of the oppressed. Everywhere he understood the languages of the natives without learning them, and even read the thoughts of men; but the language of the beasts he learned from the Arabs of Mesopotamia. On entering that country the publican asked him whether he had with him anything subject to toll. The answer of Apollonius was that he carried about righteousness, temperance, a manly soul and a patient spirit—and many another virtue named he. The sullen taxman, who had no mind for anything that lay outside his own duties, took the names of virtues for names of women, saying: “There, your maids are all down in the book.” But Apollonius calmly went his way, with the brief remark: “They are not maids, but high-born dames;” nor paid he impost on his ideal goods. In spite of his frankness of speech he was treated with great distinction by the king of that country. He told the king that he would best strengthen his royal power by honoring many and putting trust in but a few. The king, who was ill, having been comforted by the prophet, confessed that he had been freed from anxiety, not only with regard to his kingdom, but also with regard to death. From Babylon Apollonius bent his steps toward India, and there, according to the highly embellished story, saw men four or five ells in height, also men who were half white and half black; dragons, too, of various size he saw. He constantly carried on with Damis, the one disciple who accompanied him, instructive conversations about the animals and the people whom they met. An Indian king, dazzled by the splendor of the prophet’s genius, would not wear the crown in his presence. With the Brahmans, many of whose conjurfeats are recorded, e. g., flitting through the air, or at touch of their wands causing the earth to spring aloft, Apollonius swapped wisdoms; and as, in the opinion of Damis, the wisdom of the Brahmans was derived from Pythagoras, it was from Pythagoras also, of course, that they got their doctrine of metempsychosis. We learn that Apollonius also entertained that curious idea, and that he imagined himself to have been once an Indian tax-gatherer, and was wont to tell of many incidents of that phase of his life. Furthermore, in his presence the Brahmans cured the possessed, the lame, the blind, and women in difficult labor, by imposition of hands, and by giving good counsels—practices resembling those used in our day by sympathists, so-called. Apollonius returned to Babylon and Ninive, passing through fabulous lands, and then journeyed to the Ionians of Asia Minor. Apollonius banished from Ephesus an epidemic which was there raging, by requiring the citizens to stone a beggar in whom he discerned the daemon who was the cause of the disease; the culprit, under the storm of stones, was changed into a dog. Voyaging by sea to Greece, the Sage Apollonius imposed on his shipmates with the story that Achilles had appeared unto him five ells in height, and before his eyes had grown to twelve ells. At Athens, where he arrived during the Eleusinian mysteries, the priests refused to initiate him, because he was a conjurer; whereupon the Sage of Tyana told them that already he knew more about the mysteries than the priests. This alarmed them, and they wished to recall their refusal; but it was Apollonius’s turn now to refuse them, so he deferred to another time his initiation, but in public discourses let his light shine before the Athenians. In Athens, too, there was a youth possessed, who laughed and cried without cause. Apollonius having detected the true nature of the ailment, of which no one else had any suspicion, with stern looks and words of menace confronted the daemon, who thereupon fled away, and in token of his passage overturned a statue that no one had touched. But the youth, rubbing his eyes as though waking from sleep, was seen to be cured. At Corinth the Sage detected in the bride of a comely youth a lamia or empusa; i. e., one of a class of spectral beings that used to haunt people, and under pretense of being in love with them, would eat the flesh off their bones. In the presence of Apollonius all her arts and all her imps disappeared, and the spectre was unmasked and confessed her evil intent. At the Olympian Games also this apostle of the Pythagorean philosophy preached. His following was increased by the accession of several members with their slaves; these he called his “congregation.” With them he went to Rome, where the infamous Nero then reigned, who had prohibited philosophy, which he classed with soothsaying. But one who was in the service of the tyrant, impressed by the wisdom of the traveler, allowed him to lecture in the temples, and to these lectures there was great concourse. But one of his disciples who had accompanied him from Corinth, and who in Rome had ventured to condemn publicly the conduct of Nero and the prevailing immorality, was expelled from the city by Tigellinus, captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, and trusty tool of the tyrant, while Apollonius himself was kept under surveillance. But not only could nothing be proved against him; his wisdom filled even the sanguinary minions with admiration, though he spoke to them only the stern truth. For example, being asked by Tigellinus why he had no fear of Nero, he answered: “The God who makes him an object of fear made me fearless.” Asked what he thought of Nero, “Better than you do,” he replied; “ye think him gifted for singing, I for silence.” Whereupon Tigellinus: “Go wherever you please; you are stronger than any power of mine.” A bride in Rome having died, the body was on the way to the place of interment. Apollonius bade the bearers to halt, touched the damsel, uttering some secret words, and called her back from death. Philostratus himself is in doubt whether the death was not apparent only. The philosopher then journeyed to the Strait of Gibraltar, whence he traversed Spain, Sicily and Greece, and then revisited Egypt. At Alexandria he recognized the innocence of one among eight criminals, interceded for him and had the man’s execution put off till the last moment; then arrived the order to spare his life; he had confessed only under torture. The story is also told that Apollonius, on paying a visit to Vespasian, in Alexandria, “made him Caesar,” thus giving to the Roman Empire once again, after a long interval, a just ruler; but after Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, the philosopher frankly spoke the truth to him, when the Emperor annulled, as an unjust privilege, the liberties of Greece, which Nero had in a capricious humor granted on the occasion of the Olympian Games. Leaving Egypt, Apollonius journeyed to Ethiopia to visit the Gymnosophists, who dwelt in a sort of little republic of their own, on a mountain, and conducted a famous school. Probably because they were less conceited, went naked, and performed no magical feats, our Sage deemed them less wise than the Brahmans, and had resultless controversies with them about the relative superiority of Grecian and Egyptian art, the former representing the gods as resembling man, the latter as resembling animals. In that region Apollonius exorcised a satyr that was said to have killed two women. About the time of the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, Apollonius happened to be in the neighborhood of that city, and praised the Roman general for his “moderation” (though it was a curious sort of moderation which leveled a great city with the ground). Titus answered: “I have made conquest of Solyma; you have made conquest of me,” and thereafter employed Apollonius as his adviser. At Tarsus he not only cured a young man of hydrophobia, but the dog also that had bitten him. Having boldly denounced the Emperor Domitian at Ephesus, Apollonius was betrayed by his disciple Euphrates, and a plot was laid against him. Straightway he took ship for Rome, to confront the tyrant in his palace. In Rome he was thrown into prison, and treated with much harshness; but he defended himself with great spirit against the charges brought by his accuser, and was acquitted. Thereupon he uttered a tirade of reproaches against Domitian’s satellites, and suddenly vanished miraculously from the judgment hall, appearing the same day in the vicinity of Naples, where he had friends. From Naples he went to Ephesus; there, in ecstasy, he saw the assassination of Domitian, at that moment taking place in Rome; then he died. None knew what age he had attained, whether 80 years or 100, nor the time, nor the place, nor the manner of his death. According to Philostratus he appeared after his death to a young man of his native town, Tyana, who doubted the immortality of the soul, and invoked Apollonius to explain the matter; but he was invisible to the other persons present. 2. ALEXANDER THE FALSE PROPHET. It is no matter of surprise that the cold, austere virtue and wisdom, the rather hollow religion, and the clumsy miracles of Apollonius neither built up a school for him nor kept the heathen religion on its feet; and though the emperors of the third century, from Caracalla to Diocletian, consecrated temples to him, and one of them, Alexander Severus, placed his bust, with those of Moses, Socrates and Jesus, in his private chapel, nevertheless the Sage of Tyana was soon forgotten, and with him, alas! the memory of his noble courage in the presence of tyrants. On the other hand, the charlatanry he practiced became more and more the order of the day, till at last it threw off all disguise. Whether this result is chargeable to his disciples, who, like the disciples of another master, prized his miracles more than his teachings, is a question that cannot be decided; but the fact is that soon after his death (the close of the first century) a number of impostors, wearing the cloak of religion, began to ply their trade. The satirist Lucian, who lived in the second century, and who made sport of everything—religion and philosophy, gods and men, heathen and Christians—has immortalized the tomfooleries of these pseudoprophets. Of these the best known was Alexander of Abonotichus, in Asia Minor, a man greater in fraud, says Lucian, than his namesake, the son of Philip, in heroism. He was a large, handsome man, and by scrupulous care of his complexion, his hair, and his beard, enhanced the advantage nature had given him. But his character was “a compound of mendacity, fraud, perjury, and low tricks of every kind.” In his boyhood he was apprenticed to a quack of Tyana, a renegade disciple of Apollonius (whose life, by the way, Lucian, who lived nearer to him than Philostratus, calls a “comedy”), and by him was instructed in all the artifices whereby one can outwit and defraud his fellows. After his master’s death Alexander went into business on his own account. In Macedonia he procured one of the large harmless serpents found in that province and went back to his native town—Abonotichus—there to set up an “oracle factory,” as Lucian calls it. At Chalcedon he secretly placed on a roadside a tablet bearing the inscription that the god Aesculapius, with his father, Apollo, was soon to be at Abonotichus; the finding of this tablet caused great excitement. Meanwhile Alexander, in his native place, went about with his long, curling locks falling over his shoulders, wearing a purple robe with white stripes, and armed with a sabre. His stupid fellow townsmen, though they knew his parents, who were poor, believed him when he claimed descent from Perseus, and when they heard of the tablet set about erecting a temple to Aesculapius. Between the foundation stones of the temple Alexander secretly placed a goose-egg shell containing a newly-hatched snake; then with the wild gesticulations of a god-inspired enthusiast, hastened to the market-place, and there announced to the people that Aesculapius had just been born at the temple in the form of a serpent. To prove his oracle true he held up before them the egg with the snake. On the publication of this wondrous news, the populace flocked to the market-place. Alexander had a hut of boards erected, within which he seated himself in a reclining chair; then taking up the large snake already mentioned, which he had kept out of sight, he laid it on his breast, drew over its head a linen mask, painted to resemble a human face, the mouth of which would open and shut on pulling a string, and gave out to the people that the newborn god had already grown to that great size, and was now ready to give oracles. From all Asia Minor and Thrace the people came in thousands to witness the miracle. The mystic semi-obscurity of the hut and the magical effects of artificial light magnified the impression that the charlatan and his snake made on the people. Whoever wished to receive an oracle of the god had to write his question on a tablet, which was then to be sealed with wax and handed to the prophet. When the people had retired he melted the seals, read the questions, wrote the answers, then sealed the tablets again, and gave them back (with the answers) the seals apparently intact. The tariff for oracles was a drachma and eight oboli (about 25 cents), and the annual receipts amounted to seventy or eighty thousand drachmas (say $15,000), but he had out of this sum to pay a host of assistants and confederates. When the temple was completed Alexander carried on his business there. But his title to public regard did not pass unchallenged. The Epicureans, who detested all trickery, and who believed that enjoyment was the only end in life worth thinking of, manifested their hostility to the prophet, and were, in turn, denounced by him as atheists and Christians. To safeguard his reputation he added to his repertoire. First, he began to give oracles viva voce, a confederate behind a screen speaking the responses into a tube terminating at the mouth of the snake’s mask. But the charge for such oracles was higher, and they were elicited only for the behoof of persons of eminence. Alexander’s fame spread even to Rome, and dupes from that seat of enlightenment came to consult the serpent-god. One of these addle-pate pilgrims from Rome asked the oracle what manner of woman he should take to wife. The oracle named the daughter of Alexander; so he married her, and offered hecatombs to his mother-in-law, his bride’s mother, in her capacity of moon-goddess, for such Alexander gave her out to be. Encouraged by many successes not inferior to this, the prophet instituted many mystic festivals, from which he excluded all unbelievers in God, as Epicureans and Christians. At these festivals the birth of Aesculapius and the nuptials of Alexander and the Moon-Goddess were represented dramatically, though perhaps a trifle too realistically. The prophet also claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras, and in proof showed his thigh encased in gilded leather. His life was a continuous debauch. In time he began to hold what we should now call “dark seances;” that is, he would sit in absolute darkness and make response to questions submitted in writing on sealed tablets. As he could not read the questions at all, his answers (the oracles) were expressed for the most