worship, or that the faithful assembled there except for initiations or meetings for conferring the different degrees. The extremely poor execution of the bas-reliefs and other sculptures found in the majority of these chapels all points the same way. Most of these, together with the furniture and what are nowadays called “articles de culte,” were presented to the chapel by private members of the association[972]. The fact that the congregations of many chapels must have frequently changed by the shifting of garrisons from one end of the Empire to the other caused by the operations of war both external and civil, also helps to account for their temporary and poverty-stricken appearance when compared with the great and stately temples reared to rival gods like Serapis. Thus the truth of Renan’s comparison of the Mithraic faith with modern Freemasonry becomes more apparent, and we may picture to ourselves the Mithraists as a vast society spread over the whole of the Empire, consisting mainly of soldiers, and entirely confined to the male sex. The example of the Emperor Julian, himself a devotee of Mithras, but actively concerned in the propagation of the worship of other divinities, such as Apollo, Serapis, Mars, and Cybele[973], shows that its real aim was not so much the conversion of individuals as the inclusion of all other cults within itself. It was doubtless with this view that Julian recalled from exile those heresiarchs who had been banished by the Christian emperors and insisted on equal toleration for all sects of Jews and Christians[974]. Themistius is no doubt merely echoing the sentiments of the Mithraist emperor when he writes to his Christian successor Jovian that no lover of wisdom should bind himself to any exclusively national worship, but should acquaint himself with all religions[975]. God, he says, requires no agreement on this subject among men, and their rivalries in matters of faith are really beneficial in leading their minds to the contemplation of other than worldly things. But this highly philosophic temper was not reached all at once; and it is probable that the worship of Mithras was, on its first importation into the West, but one foreign superstition the more, as little enlightened and as exclusively national as the Jewish, the Egyptian, or any of the others. It was probably its rise to imperial favour under the Antonines, when Commodus and many of the freedmen of Caesar’s House were initiated, that first suggested to its votaries the possibility of using it as an instrument of government; and henceforth its fortunes were bound up with those of the still Pagan State. Its strictly monarchical doctrine, using the adjective in its ancient rather than in its modern connotation, must have always endeared it to the emperors, who were beginning to see clearly that in a _quasi_-Oriental despotism lay the only chance of salvation for the Roman Empire. Its