Public feasts were the scene for the delivery of those discourses. They found their way also to Rome, but the _spirituality of Redemption_ not going hand-in-hand with its _doctrine_, or not duly comprehended, if accompanying, the _joyousness_ of _hope_, was there sunk into the _licentiousness_ of _enjoyment_, and the innocence of mirth and of moral hilarity was superseded by the uproar of riot and of vice! _Such were the Saturnalia._ How different was their celebration in our “Sacred Ireland!” The very letters of the epithet, by which our forefathers had solemnised them, show the spirituality of purpose which actuated their zeal. _Nullog_ was that epithet--it is compounded of _nua_, _new_; and _log_ (for bullog), a _belly_, meaning _regeneration_, or the putting aside of the old leaven of sin, and the assumption of the new investiture of righteousness, by justification. As everything, however, in their religious procedure was transacted by symbols, so, in this instance, they did not content themselves with the _inner consciousness_ of a _new birth_,[400] but the most go through the outer form of it by typification; and for this end it was that they excavated those _apertures_ in the bodies of rocks, which I have noticed in page 314, as calling forth, from ignorance, the animadversion of the _devil’s yonies_, in order that, by _passing themselves through them, they might represent the condition of one issuing, through the womb, to a new scope of life_.[401] A nobler method of symbolisation, and confined solely to the _initiated_, was that which characterised the construction of their subterranean temples. Here the sublimity of their worship breaks out in all the grandeur and the majesty of awe.[402] The narrowness of the entrance, never larger than the girth of the ordinary human body, pourtrayed, as well the _circular passage_ in their regenerating _type_,[403] as the _circumvention_ of temptation by which the faithful are ever beset;[404] while _the model_ of the _cross, which regulates their architecture withinside, attests the mystery and the form of their master’s death_. The Mithratic temple, at New Grange, is exactly so constructed. After squeezing yourself, with much labour, through a long _emblematic_ gallery, you arrive at a _circular room_, or rather an _irregular polygon or octagon_;[405] whence, at measured intervals, three other apartments diverge, forming, with the inleading gut, a perfect _cross_; and presenting, altogether, to a susceptible mind, _the most solemn combination of symbolical mysteries_![406]