To imagine the thrill and the force of these rites, one must imagine a mediæval passion-play {86} performed with surpassing stateliness and solemnity. Those who saw these things in the Hall of the Mysteries at Eleusis may have carried away with them an abiding sense of a closer communion with the benign powers of the nether world and a resulting hope of a happier posthumous lot. We must regard them as the highest and most spiritual product of the pure Hellenic religion, investing it with an atmosphere of mystery and awe that was generally lacking in the public cult, and which was unperturbed at Eleusis by any violence of morbid ecstasy such as marked the Phrygian and some of the Orphic rites. We may believe that they exercised a healthful influence on the moral and spiritual temperament of the Hellene; but it is not clear that they definitely proclaimed any higher moral theory, nor do they appear like the Orphica to have preached any dogma of metaphysic or theology. But, like the Orphica, they tended to widen the horizon of the religious spirit; for they appealed to a far larger public than the ordinary cults of the city; and while being Pan-Hellenic in this sense they belong to the domain of personal religion, for they satisfied the personal craving of the individual for closer fellowship with the deity and they soothed the troublous apprehensions that were growing up in this second period concerning the individual destiny of the soul. Yet as regards Attica and Athens at least and probably as regards Hellas, they are not to be ranked, as the Orphica may be, among the disruptive forces of individualistic religion, undermining the social fabric of public worship. For the Athenian State administered them--by the help of Eleusinian officials--in its corporate capacity; and one of the catechumens--the {87} παῖς ἀφ᾽ ἑστίας--was initiated, according to the most probable view, in behalf of the whole youth of the city.[87.1] In the great mysteries the agrarian significance, though discoverable and associated with simple agrarian magic, was overshadowed by higher and more spiritual religion. And elsewhere in the State-festivals we note this same phenomenon of progress in this second period. Old-world utilitarian rites of agriculture and fertility were often taken over by the expanding Polis and received an artistic elaboration that disguised their original significance for the primitive peasant and raised them to a higher plane of social religion. This interesting process can be best studied in following the detailed records of the Laconian Karneia and Hyakinthia, the Delphic Pythia, the Attic Panathenaia: we can feelingly appreciate in these the potent influence of the lyric poetry, the music, and the art of early Greece, shaping and elevating men’s imagination of divinity.