That this altar was the expression of a blind though real groping after the true God, is distinctly attested by Paul.—“Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.”—Acts xvii, 23. To suppose as do some that the altar was erected by one who was uncertain which of the tutelary deities he should propitiate, implies Paul to have resorted to a weak pretense, founded on the mere jingle of words, which, so far from constituting an appropriate and impressive basis for his argument and appeal, would have invited the derision and contempt of his skeptical audience. He adopted no such artifice; but appealed to a recognized and affecting fact. Of the various forms of purification among the Greeks, Plato makes an enumeration.—“The _purifications_ (_katharmoi_) both according to medicine and vaticination, both the pharmacial _drugs_, (_pharmakois_), and the vaticinal _fumigations_ (_peritheiōseis_) as also the _washings_ (_loutra_) in such rites, and the _sprinklings_ (_perirrhanseis_);—are not all these effectual to one end,—to render a man pure, both as to body and soul?”[39] Footnote 39: Plato, in Cratylo, xxii. On this subject, the historian Grote makes some noteworthy statements.—“The names of Orpheus and Musaeus (as well as that of Pythagoras, looking at one side of his character), represent facts of importance in the history of the Grecian mind, ... the gradual influx of Thracian, Phrygian and Egyptian religious ceremonies and feelings, and the increasing diffusion of special mysteries, schemes for religious purification, and orgies (I venture to Anglicize the Greek word, which contains in its original meaning no implication of the ideas of excess to which it was afterward diverted), in honor of some particular god, distinct from the public solemnities, and from the gentile solemnities of primitive Greece.... During the interval between Hesiod and Onomakritus [B. C. 610-510], the revolution in the religious mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities [Dyonisus and Demeter, the Bacchus and Ceres of the Latins] in the front rank.... From all these countries [Egypt, Thrace, Phrygia and Lydia], novelties unknown to the Homeric men found their way into the Grecian worship; and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile, or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime. Now, in the times subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be indispensable. The guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of men, or the worship of the gods, until he has received it; and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the ceremony of