SECTION IV. OF THE END OF THE MYSTERIES, WHEREIN THE LEARNED PRELATE IS ALLOWED.

Upon the third assertion I have the satisfaction of agreeing with the learned prelate, and I should have been content to say so in a sentence, were it not that the testimony which most clearly supports him has been, as it appears to me, less considered than its importance deserves, and that it supplies, when it is attentively read, a further confirmation of what I have maintained respecting the origin. Cicero, in the second book of his treatise on the laws, pronounces the Mysteries of the Athenians to have been the most excellent of all the things that Athens had brought into the life of men: for by them, he says, men were drawn out of a rude and savage life and softened into humanity; and they are called initiations, initiaque ut appellantur ita re vera principia vitae cognovimus (and as they are called beginnings, so in truth we have learned from them the first principles of life); and from them men received, not only the rule of living with gladness, but also the hope of dying with a better expectation, cum spe meliore moriendi (with a better hope in dying).¹ NB-48-003 NB-46-009

Of this testimony it is to be observed, in the first place, that the writer speaks of the benefit as one in which he and those to whom he speaks had shared; and in the second place, that the benefit is twofold, and that the second part of it is precisely the end which the learned prelate assigns to the whole institution. I am therefore unable to dispute the third assertion, and I do not attempt it. But I would observe, at the same time, that the place is wholly silent upon the origin of the rite: it does not say that the Athenians received it from Egypt, nor that any legislator contrived it for the uses of the state; and that the word in which the orator plays upon the name of the rite, calling the initiations the beginnings of life, is one which, though it might be pressed in favour of the view which I maintain, I prefer not to press, as resting rather upon the turn of an expression than upon the weight of a testimony.² NB-48-003

To the same purpose, though with a different bearing, is the relation of Diodorus, already cited for the origin, that the punishments of the unrighteous in the place of the dead, and the fields of the righteous, were introduced by Orpheus in imitation of the funeral customs of the Egyptians.³ The doctrine of a future state, which the learned prelate makes the end of the Mysteries, is here described as having been carried, with the rites themselves, out of Egypt into Greece; and so far the relation confirms both his third assertion and his fourth. But it describes the doctrine as imitated by the person who brought it, and not as invented by him; and it thus affords, in the very place in which it supports the end which the learned prelate assigns to the Mysteries, a further instance of the manner of their transmission which his first assertion requires us to deny. NB-45-004 NB-46-009

I add, for the sake of completeness, and without resting upon it any weight which the character of the writer would not bear, the relation of Apuleius concerning the initiation of his narrator, who declines to say what was said and done, "if it were lawfull for me to tell," and who declares only that "I approached neere unto Hell, even to the gates of Proserpina," and that "About midnight I saw the Sun shine," and that he beheld the gods of heaven and of the lower world and worshipped them.⁴ That the experience which is here described is that of passing through death and returning from it, is sufficiently evident; and it accords, so far as a fable can accord with anything, with the end which the learned prelate assigns. But it is to be received as fable; and its reserve, which is the reserve of one who has received a thing and is bound not to declare it, is of more value to the present argument than its matter. NB-49-008