cure them of selfishness, and afterwards the initiator points to the blue
vault of sky, bidding them behold "Our Father, Mungan-ngaur." This is
very well meant, and very creditable to untutored savages: and creditable
ideas were not absent from the Eleusinia. But when we use the quotation,
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," our meaning,
though not very definite, is a meaning which it would be hazardous to
attribute to a black boy,--or to Sophocles. The idea of the New Life
appears to occur in Australian Mysteries: a tribesman is buried, and
rises at a given signal. But here the New Life is rather that of the lad
admitted to full tribal privileges (including moral precepts) than that
of a converted character. Confirmation, rather than conversion, is the
analogy. The number of those analogies of ancient and savage with
Christian religion is remarkable. But even in Greek Mysteries the
conceptions are necessarily not so purely spiritual as in the Christian
creed, of which they seem half-conscious and fragmentary anticipations.
Or we may regard them as suggestions, which Christianity selected,
accepted, and purified.




HYMN TO DEMETER


THE ALLEGED EGYPTIAN ORIGINS


In what has been said as to the Greek Mysteries, I have regarded them as
of native origin. I have exhibited rites of analogous kinds in the germ,
as it were, among savage and barbaric communities. In Peru, under the