alike in its moderate and its extreme forms. The moderate forms seemed to him lukewarm; the extreme forms

were a simple abomination.

Such was the view of one school or class in the Christian Church. The opposite view, that the Pagan

Mysteries were a mere abomination, is represented much more strongly in the Christian literature. There is

not necessarily any contradiction between them. Ignatius felt, as we have said, that his Pagan life was a

cause of lasting humiliation and shame to him, even though he was fully conscious t hat his religious

sensibility had been developing through it. We need not doubt that he would have endorsed and approved

every word of the charges which the Christian apologists made against the Mysteries. Both views are true,

but both are partial: neither gives a complete statement of the case.

The mystic meaning that lay in even the grossest ceremonies of the Eleusinian and other Mysteries has

been rightly insisted upon by Miss J. E. Harrison in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

(especially chapter 8), a work well worthy of being studied. Miss Harrison has the philosophic insight which

the ancients declare to be necessary in order to understand and learn from the Mysteries. Their evil side is

to her non-existent, and the old Christian writers who inveighed against the gross and hideous rites enacted

in the Mysteries are repeatedly denounced by her in scathing terms as full of unclean imaginings--though

she fully admits, of course, the truth of the facts which they allude to or describe in detail. The authoress,

standing on the lofty place of philosophic idealism, can see only the mystic meaning, while she is too far

removed above the ugliness to be cognisant of it. But to shut one's eyes to the evil does not annihilate it for

the world, though it may annihilate it for the few who shut their eyes. Plato in the Second Book of the

Republic is as emphatic as Firmicus or Clemens in recognising the harm that those ugly tales and acts of the

gods did to the mass of the people. This must all be borne in mind while studying her brilliant work.