Him', like men groping in the darkness. Pythagoras lived before the time
of history, and almost nothing is known about him, though his teaching
and his name were never lost. There is a belief that he had traveled in
the East, and in Egypt, and as he lived about the time of the dispersion
of the Israelites, it is possible that some of his purest and best
teaching might have been crumbs gathered from their fuller instruction
through the Law and the Prophets. One thing is plain, that even in
dealing with heathenism the Divine rule holds good, 'By their fruits ye
shall know them'. Golden Deeds are only to be found among men whose
belief is earnest and sincere, and in something really high and noble.
Where there was nothing worshiped but savage or impure power, and the
very form of adoration was cruel and unclean, as among the Canaanites
and Carthaginians, there we find no true self-devotion. The great deeds
of the heathen world were all done by early Greeks and Romans before yet
the last gleams of purer light had faded out of their belief, and while
their moral sense still nerved them to energy; or else by such later
Greeks as had embraced the deeper and more earnest yearnings of the
minds that had become a 'law unto themselves'.

The Pythagoreans were bound together in a brotherhood, the members of
which had rules that are not now understood, but which linked them so as
to form a sort of club, with common religious observances and pursuits
of science, especially mathematics and music. And they were taught to
restrain their passions, especially that of anger, and to endure with
patience all kinds of suffering; believing that such self-restraint
brought them nearer to the gods, and that death would set them free from
the prison of the body. The souls of evil-doers would, they thought,
pass into the lower and more degraded animals, while those of good men
would be gradually purified, and rise to a higher existence. This,
though lamentably deficient, and false in some points, was a real