themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced by
the common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributed
among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him
to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility
to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and
Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine,
comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition
of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained
in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity,
became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the
poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic
nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of
all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that
no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating
into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of
personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from
a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among
the consequences of these events.

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive.
The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world.