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]