To what did it owe this transcendent character? It was not because men here worshipped exceptional gods, for the worship of Demeter and Cora was an old and widely diffused cult all over Greece: and there were other Eleusinia in various places. It was not because the ceremony consisted of mysteries, of hidden acts and words, which it was impious to reveal, and which the initiated alone might know. For the habit of secret worship was practised in every state, where special clans were charged with the care of special secret services, which no man else might know. Nay, even within the ordinary homes of the Greeks there were these Mysteries. Neither was it because of the splendor of the temple and its appointments, which never equalled the Panathenæa at the Parthenon, or the riches of Delphi, or Olympia. There is only one reasonable cause, and it is that upon which all our serious authorities agree. The doctrine taught in the Mysteries was a faith which revealed hopeful things about the world to come; and which—not so much as a condition, but as a consequence, of this clearer light, this higher faith—made them better citizens and better men. This faith was taught them in the Mysteries through symbols,(88) through prayer and fasting, through wild rejoicings; but, as Aristotle expressly tells us, it was reached not by intellectual persuasion, but by a change into a new moral state—in fact, by being spiritually revived. Here, then, we have the strangest and most striking analogy to our religion in the Greek mythology; for here we have a higher faith publicly taught,—any man might present himself to be initiated,—and taught, not in opposition to the popular creed, but merely by deepening it, and showing to the ordinary worldling its spiritual power. The belief in the Goddess Demeter and her daughter, the queen of the nether world, was, as I have said, common all over Greece; but even as nowadays we are told that there may be two kinds of belief of the same truths—one of the head and another of the heart—just as the most excellent man of the world, who believes all the creeds of the Church, is called an unbeliever, in the higher sense, by our Evangelical Christians; so the ordinary Greek, though he prayed and offered at the Temple of Demeter, was held by the initiated at the Mysteries to be wallowing in the mire of ignorance, and stumbling in the night of gloom—he was held to live without real light, and to die without hope, in wretched despair.(89) [Illustration: Temple of Mysteries, Eleusis]