which half expects to bring good harvest luck by various mummeries; and
the creed is mystical as the hidden things and words unknown which
assured Pindar and Sophocles of secure felicity in this and in the future
life.

The creed is beautiful as the exquisite profile of the corn-tressed head
of Persephone on Syracusan coins: and it is grotesque as the custom which
bade the pilgrims to Eleusis bathe in the sea, each with the pig which he
was about to sacrifice. The highest religious hopes, the meanest magical
mummeries are blended in this religion. That one element is earlier than
the other we cannot say with much certainty. The ritual aspect, as
concerned with the happy future of the soul, does not appear in Iliad or
Odyssey, where the Mysteries are not named. But the silence of Homer is
never a safe argument in favour of his ignorance, any more than the
absence of allusion to tobacco in Shakspeare is a proof that tobacco was,
in his age, unknown.

We shall find that a barbaric people, the Pawnees, hold a mystery
precisely parallel to the Demeter legend: a Mystery necessarily
unborrowed from Greece. The Greeks, therefore, may have evolved the
legend long before Homer's day, and he may have known the story which he
does not find occasion to tell. As to what was said, shown, and done in
the Eleusinia, we only gather that there was a kind of Mystery Play on
the sacred legend; that there were fastings, vigils, sacrifices, secret
objects displayed, sacred words uttered; and that thence such men as
Pindar and Sophocles received the impression that for them, in this and
the future life, all was well, was well for those of pure hearts and
hands. The "purity" may partly have been ritual, but was certainly
understood, also, as relating to excellence of life. Than such a faith
(for faith it is) religion has nothing better to give. But the extreme