established system and to the overthrow of the popular superstition.
Socrates, the Athenian sage, is an illustrious instance of the punishment
that was meted out to the bold innovator who attempted to insult the gods
and to poison the minds of youth with the heresies of a philosophic
religion. "They permitted, therefore," says a learned writer on this
subject[8], "the multitude to remain plunged as they were in the depth of
a gross and complicated idolatry; but for those philosophic few who could
bear the light of truth without being confounded by the blaze, they
removed the mysterious veil, and displayed to them the Deity in the
radiant glory of his unity. From the vulgar eye, however, these doctrines
were kept inviolably sacred, and wrapped in the veil of impenetrable
mystery."

The consequence of all this was, that no one was permitted to be invested
with the knowledge of these sublime truths, until by a course of severe
and arduous trials, by a long and painful initiation, and by a formal
series of gradual preparations, he had proved himself worthy and capable
of receiving the full light of wisdom. For this purpose, therefore, those
peculiar religious institutions were organized which the ancients
designated as the MYSTERIES, and which, from the resemblance of their
organization, their objects, and their doctrines, have by masonic writers
been called the "Spurious Freemasonry of Antiquity."

Warburton,[9] in giving a definition of what these Mysteries were, says,
"Each of the pagan gods had (besides the public and open) a secret worship
paid unto him, to which none were admitted but those who had been selected
by preparatory ceremonies, called initiation. This secret worship was
termed the Mysteries." I shall now endeavor briefly to trace the
connection between these Mysteries and the institution of Freemasonry; and
to do so, it will be necessary to enter upon some details of the
constitution of those mystic assemblies.

Almost every country of the ancient world had its peculiar Mysteries,
dedicated to the occult worship of some especial and favorite god, and to
the inculcation of a secret doctrine, very different from that which was
taught in the public ceremonial of devotion. Thus in Persia the Mysteries
were dedicated to Mithras, or the Sun; in Egypt, to Isis and Osiris; in
Greece, to Demeter; in Samothracia, to the gods Cabiri, the Mighty Ones;
in Syria, to Dionysus; while in the more northern nations of Europe, such
as Gaul and Britain, the initiations were dedicated to their peculiar
deities, and were celebrated under the general name of the Druidical
rites. But no matter where or how instituted, whether ostensibly in honor
of the effeminate Adonis, the favorite of Venus, or of the implacable
Odin, the Scandinavian god of war and carnage; whether dedicated to
Demeter, the type of the earth, or to Mithras, the symbol of all that
fructifies that earth,--the great object and design of the secret
instruction were identical in all places, and the Mysteries constituted a
school of religion in which the errors and absurdities of polytheism were
revealed to the initiated. The candidate was taught that the multitudinous
deities of the popular theology were but hidden symbols of the various
attributes of the supreme god,--a spirit invisible and indivisible,--and
that the soul, as an emanation from his essence, could "never see
corruption," but must, after the death of the body, be raised to an
eternal life.[10]

That this was the doctrine and the object of the Mysteries is evident from
the concurrent testimony both of those ancient writers who flourished
contemporaneously with the practice of them, and of those modern scholars
who have devoted themselves to their investigation.

Thus Isocrates, speaking of them in his Panegyric, says, "Those who have
been initiated in the Mysteries of Ceres entertain better hopes both as to
the end of life and the whole of futurity." [11]

Epictetus[12] declares that everything in these Mysteries was instituted
by the ancients for the instruction and amendment of life.

And Plato[13] says that the design of initiation was to restore the soul
to that state of perfection from which it had originally fallen.

Thomas Taylor, the celebrated Platonist, who possessed an unusual
acquaintance with the character of these ancient rites, asserts that they
"obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the
soul, both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a
material nature, and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual
vision." [14]

Creuzer,[15] a distinguished German writer, who has examined the subject
of the ancient Mysteries with great judgment and elaboration, gives a
theory on their nature and design which is well worth consideration.

This theory is, that when there had been placed under the eyes of the
initiated symbolical representations of the creation of the universe, and
the origin of things, the migrations and purifications of the soul, the
beginning and progress of civilization and agriculture, there was drawn
from these symbols and these scenes in the Mysteries an instruction
destined only for the more perfect, or the epopts, to whom were
communicated the doctrines of the existence of a single and eternal God,
and the destination of the universe and of man.

Creuzer here, however, refers rather to the general object of the
instructions, than to the character of the rites and ceremonies by which
they were impressed upon the mind; for in the Mysteries, as in
Freemasonry, the Hierophant, whom we would now call the Master of the
Lodge, often, as Lobeck observes, delivered a mystical lecture, or
discourse, on some moral subject.

Faber, who, notwithstanding the predominance in his mind of a theory which
referred every rite and symbol of the ancient world to the traditions of
Noah, the ark, and the deluge, has given a generally correct view of the