Everything was fitted to awaken feelings of reverence and awe, and the whole celebration seems to have held a similar place in the religion of the Greeks to what the Mass has among Roman Catholics, the Communion among Protestants, and the Easter Eve ceremonial among the members of the Greek Church. While the sorrows of bereavement, the pangs of inevitable death, and the mysterious gloom of the underworld could hardly fail to be impressed on the minds of the celebrants, the return of Persephone to her mother in spring seems to have inspired a hope of immortality, for we are told that the culminating point in the service in the Telesterium was the mowing down of a ripe ear of corn. It requires no stretch of imagination to believe that it conveyed to the devout worshipper something of the thought which Jesus Christ expressed on the eve of His death to certain Greeks who came desiring to see Him, when He said, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The same thought is echoed by St. Paul in writing to the Corinthians on the subject of the Resurrection, when he says, “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.” This view of the Mysteries is confirmed by the statement made by Cicero, who had himself been initiated, that they taught men “not only to live happily but also to die with a fairer hope.” Like all symbolic rites, however, they depended for [Illustration: THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE MYSTERIES, ELEUSIS. LOOKING NORTH-EAST On the left, in the immediate foreground, is part of the early girdle wall of the sacred precincts, above which is the edge of the Acropolis rock, with a chapel of the Panagia, and belfry above. To the right are bases of votive offerings. In the distance are the mountains of Attica.] their efficacy on the susceptibilities of the worshipper. Plutarch says that it required a philosophical training and a religious frame of mind to comprehend them, and Galen maintained that “the study of Nature, if prosecuted with the concentrated attention given to the Mysteries, is even more fitted than they are to reveal the power and wisdom of God, as these truths are less clearly expressed in the Mysteries than in Nature.” There is no evidence that metempsychosis or transmigration of souls had any place in the rites, and they appear to have been free from the grossness of the Orphic and Phrygian Mysteries, as well as from the superstition associated with Pythagoreanism. It has been suggested that they may have been of Egyptian origin, and recently this theory has derived some support from the discovery of three Egyptian scarabs in the grave of a woman, who appears to have been a priestess, as more than sixty vases of various kinds were found buried with her, besides a great quantity of female jewellery, in gold and silver and bronze and iron.