While at Athens he was also initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. This act was not with him merely an act of State-policy, an act of condescension to an alien religion such as other Emperors often showed; nor was it, as it was with Hadrian, the outcome of a restless desire to pry into the novel and the mysterious. With Marcus Aurelius it was probably a sincere act of religion. There was much in the symbolism and ritual of the mysteries, its hymns and processions and dramatic representations resembling the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, in its fasting and nightly torchlight processions by the sea-shore and through the plain, which would appeal to his ritualistic nature. The doctrines of expiation and a future life, the καλαὶ ἐλπίδες--the fair hopes of Eleusis, must have had an especial attraction for him. As to his own religious views, he certainly was not the Agnostic which Renan would have him be. “In every time and place,” he says, “it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods.” He asserts that it is impious to deny the existence of the gods, and he rests his theories of right and wrong on the supposition of their existence. True, as Renan points out, he often holds out to himself the alternative of their non-existence, but even then it is only to assert the existence of the Divinity in another form. He says that if they did not exist, yet truth to our own nature would be a sufficient motive for right action; but our nature is for him but a part of the nature which is Divine, and derives its sanction from its participation in this supreme nature. His religion was a strange mixture of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism; but to atheism he never really consents. Strictly speaking, he had no philosophy or theology; for he was not interested in systems as such. Yet he never wavered in his loyalty to the national religion, however much or little of it he really believed when he stood at the sacrificial altar in pontifical robes and chanted the ancient hymns and formularies, all of which he knew by heart. Indeed, he was more deeply interested in the practical than in the pure reason; and conduct was more for him than dogma: hence it is that his thoughts are so intensely human and universal in their appeal. His nature, however, had little in common with the light and frivolous agnosticism of Renan and the dilettanti; and only a very subjective interpretation of the Meditations can eliminate from them the “supernatural” element. Renan recognises this element to a certain extent, and accounts it a blemish “which, however, does not affect the marvellous beauty of the work as a whole.” It is for him, as for Matthew Arnold, the gospel of those who walk by sight and not by faith, “who have no faith in the supernatural”; and it “will never grow old because it affirms no dogma.”