XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL

The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I

think, from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing

clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter,

at the risk of some repetition, to bring the whole argument

together. And the argument is that since the dawn

of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands

or perhaps a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic

evolution, a gradual development or refinement of

Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously

given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious

belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in

the race at large or in any branch of it) always following,

step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees

of psychologic evolution concerned; and that it is this

general fact which accounts for the strange similarities of

belief and ritual which have been observed all over the world

and in places far remote from each other, and which have been

briefly noted in the preceding chapters.

And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those

at any rate with which we are here concerned--are Three:

the stage of Simple Consciousness, the stage of Self-

consciousness, and a third Stage which for want of a

better word we may term the stage of Universal Consciousness.

Of course these three stages may at some future

time be analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--

but at present I only desire to draw attention to them in

the rough, so to speak, to show that it is from them and

from their passage one into another that there has flowed

by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange

panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions

and magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally,

and later its incantations and prophecies, and services

of speech and verse, and paintings and forms of art

and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama indeed,

or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony

with three great leading motives!

And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For

hundreds of centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed

a degree of consciousness not radically different from that

of the higher Animals, though probably more quick and

varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted

or reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions.

But the consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from

his impressions, as separate from his surroundings, had

not yet arisen or taken hold on him. He was an instinctive

part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very near to

the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a

germinal form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak,

in the general world consciousness. It is on this account

that the animals have such a marvellously acute perception

and instinct, being embedded in Nature. And primitive

Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,

allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort

of grace and perfection of form and movement as we admire

in the (wild) animals now. It would be quite unreasonable

to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of creation,

was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion. For

a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher

animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing

for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well

adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the

earth and with each other. There must have been

a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at any

rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the

epithet 'golden.'

It was during this period apparently that the system of

Totems arose. The tribes felt their relationship to their

winged and fourfooted mates (including also other objects

of nature) so deeply and intensely that they adopted the

latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly

worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after

them. Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose

conceptions of these beautiful creatures are mostly derived

from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy

milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and

despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen

or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial

instinct what profit we could extract from them.

But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals;

they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural

friendship,[1] and accorded them a kind of divinity. This

was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of

solidarity with Nature. And the point of it all is (with regard

to the subject we have in hand) that this was also

the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of

Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense

of ties binding his inner self to the powers of the universe

around him, then it is evident I think that primitive man

as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense

--though so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly

aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of

the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into

consciousness.

[1] See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,

edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction

between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is

hardly to be found among the lower races."

Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment

in the evolution of a child--somewhere perhaps about the

age of three[1]--when the simple almost animal-like consciousness

of the babe is troubled by a new element--SELF-consciousness. The

change is so marked, so definite, that

(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take

place. So in the evolution of the human race there has

been a period--also marked and definite, though extending

intermittent over a vast interval of time--when on men in

general there dawned the consciousness of THEMSELVES,

of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance

of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION.

The question arose: "How do these sensations and experiences

affect ME? What can _I_ do to modify them, to

encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the painful,

and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added

to life. The mind revolved round a new centre. It began

to spin like a little eddy round its own axis. It studied

ITSELF first and became deeply concerned about its own

pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger

life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life

of the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity,

were broken up.

[1] See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1

and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--

where the same age is tentatively suggested.

I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important

that the reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable

severance, an inevitable period of strife. The

magic mirror of the soul, reflecting nature as heretofore

in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked across.

The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually)

became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife

with his fellows. Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of

domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in.

The influences of fellowship and solidarity grew feebler.

He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts

were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-

activity and self-regarding calculation took their place.

Love and mutual help were less compelling in proportion as

the demands of self-interest grew louder and more insistent.

Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered his brother

and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the

Golden Age closed their gates behind him. He entered

upon a period of suffering--a period of labor and toil and

sorrow such as he had never before known, and such

as the animals certainly have never known. And in that

distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage,

he still remains to-day.

Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work.

It would be foolish and useless to rail against the process,

or to blame any one for it. It had to be. Through this

dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had to pass--if only in

order at last to find the True Self which was (and still

remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever.

Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the

following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the

beginning of the human soul's return to sanity and ascent

towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will

arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely

beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though

he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this

nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit and Cruelty

and Lust of oppression and domination, which marks the

present period, is past--and it WILL pass--then Humanity

will come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of

redemption and peace which has for so long been prophesied.

But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what

I want the reader to see is that it was just this breaking

up of the old psychologic unity and continuity of man with

his surroundings which led to the whole panorama of the

rituals and creeds. Man, centering round himself, necessarily

became an exile from the great Whole. He committed the

sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was

swift. The sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came

on him. The realization of himself as a separate conscious

being necessarily led to his attributing a similar consciousness

of some kind to the great Life around him. Action

and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may have

felt before, it became clear to him now that beings

more or less like himself--though doubtless vaster and

more powerful--moved behind the veil of the visible world.

From that moment the belief in Magic and Demons and

Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of

this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived

himself an alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken

with the sense of Sin. If before, he had experienced

fear--in the kind of automatic way of self-preservation

in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered self-

regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or

treble degree. And if, before, he had been aware that

fortune and chance were not always friendly and propitious

to his designs, he now perceived or thought he perceived

in every adverse happening the deliberate persecution of the

powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against

him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them.

Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose

the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether

purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational

and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of

offence against these powers; there arose a complex

ritual of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and

suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too

a whole catalogue of ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation,

by which the novice should learn to keep within the good

grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe

and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic

meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common

life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies

of Marriage and rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to

curb the terrific and demonic violence of passions which

else indeed might easily rend the community asunder.

And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early stage

of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting

this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival

of SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in

spontaneous yet logical order a whole series of religious

institutions and beliefs, which phantasmal and unreal

as they may appear to us, were by no means unreal to our

ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the psychological

process was necessarily of similar general character in every

branch of the human race and all over the world, so the

religious evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much

the same complexion everywhere; and, though they differed

in details according to climate and other influences, ran

on such remarkably parallel lines as we have noted.

Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat

that this event, the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took

place, or BEGAN to take place, an enormous time ago, perhaps

in the beginning of the Neolithic Age. I dwell on the word

"began" because I think it is probable that in its beginnings,

and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness

had an infantile and very innocent character, quite different

from its later and more aggressive forms--just as we see

self-consciousness in a little child has a charm and a grace

which it loses later in a boastful or grasping boyhood and

manhood. So we may understand that though self-consciousness may

have begun to appear in the human race

at this very early time (and more or less contemporaneously

with the invention of very rude tools and unformed

language), there probably did elapse a very long period--

perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the evils

of this second stage of human evolution came to a head.

Max Muller has pointed out that among the words which

are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and

which therefore belong to the very early period before

the separation of these branches, there are not found the words

denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments

of strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance

of peaceful habit among mankind AFTER the first formation

and use of language.

That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness

were APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable

theory, and one favored by many thinkers;[1] but the

slow beginnings of both must have been so very protracted

that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact

determination. Late researches seem to show that language

began in what might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood

and feeling (holophrases like "go-hunting-kill-bear") without

reference to individual personalities and relationships;

and that it was only at a later stage that words like "I"

and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up

into "parts of speech" and took on a definite grammatical

structure.[2] If true, these facts point clearly to a long

foreground of rude communal language, something like

though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding

or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in

the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of

personal actions and relations. "They show that the

plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by

multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual

EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.' "[3] According

to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human

family, or in any particular race or section of the human

family, must have been equally slow and hesitating; and it

would be easy to imagine, as just said, that there may have

been a very long and 'golden' period at its beginning, before

the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher

forms.

[1] Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their

simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we

should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does

not differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the

holophrase and the much later growth of formed and grammatical

speech.

[2] See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's

Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World

called America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of

self-consciousness is associated with the break-up of the

holophrase.

[3] Themis, p. 471.

All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of

early man are notoriously most divergent and most difficult

to be sure of; but if we take 500,000 years ago for

the first appearance of veritable Man (homo primigenius),[2]

and (following Professor W. J. Sollas)[3] 30,000 or 40,000 years

ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of the

Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings

and inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian

peoples, and 5,000 years ago for the first actual historical

records that have come down to us, we may

perhaps get something like a proportion between the different

periods. That is to say, half a million years for

the purely animal man in his different forms and grades of

evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of palaeolithic

or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly

beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination

and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic

period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago,

and to-day (we hope), reaching the climax which precedes

or foretells its abatement and transformation.

[2] Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93

and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.

[3] See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.

"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The

Philosophy of Conflict and other Essays.

No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor

periods greatly LONGER than those here mentioned; but

possibly there would be some agreement as to the RATIO

to each other of the times concerned: that is, the said

authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man[1]-

period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter

aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the

Second Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or

fiftieth of the time of the first period; and then--if

they looked forward at all to a third stage--would be inclined

for obvious reasons to attribute to that again a very extended

duration.

[1] I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of

contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used

it, but with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as

one feels towards the animals themselves.

However, all this is very speculative. To return to the

difficulty about Language and the consideration of those early

times when words adequate to the expression of religious

or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is clear

that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of

expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures,

in attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate

ritual, in fact.[1] Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving,

confession of Guilt, placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice,

Celebration of Community, sacramental Atonement, and

a score of others could at that time be expressed by appropriate

rites--and as a matter of fact are often so expressed

even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.

'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did

not mean a mere flinging about of the limbs in recreation,

but any expressive movements of the body which might be

used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience

whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became

a most important part of ritual.

[1] See ch. ix and xi.

So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us

now pass on to the Third Stage. It is evident that the

process of disruption and dissolution--disruption both of

the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the

action of the Second Stage--could not go on indefinitely.

There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present

moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their

nervous systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive

self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and

restlessness. Society at large is perishing both in industry

and in warfare through the domination in its organism of

the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This

cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in

the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are

approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element

must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals)

and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh

start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?

It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry

into a further stage of consciousness which must supersede

the present one. Through some such crisis as we have spoken

of, through the extreme of suffering, the mind of

Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die.[1] Self-consciousness

has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new form.

Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring

this about.[2] And what is this new form in which consciousness

has to rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the

world during countless centuries have dated from that

fatal attempt to make the little personal SELF the centre of

effort and activity, and since that attempt has inevitably led

to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind itself

and within the body of society, there is nothing left but

the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as

its foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the

direct SENSE AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout

creation. The simple mind of Early Man and the Animals

was of that character--a consciousness, so to speak, continuous

through nature, and though running to points of

illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet

at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate

compartments. (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive

mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to

understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.)

To some such unity-consciousness we have to return;

but clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate

character of the First Stage, for it has been enriched,

deepened, and greatly extended by the experience of the

Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of mentality--the

consciousness of the Third Stage.

[1] "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an

end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.

[2] One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu

yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries

generally.

In order to understand the operation and qualities of this

Third Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now

to consider in what more or less rudimentary way or ways

it figured in the pagan rituals and in Christianity. We have

seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or

the 'Grizzly' tribes of North American Indians in the

neighborhood of Mount Shasta paying their respects and

adoration to a captive bear--at once the food-animal,

and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had slain a

bear--and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with

all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own

satisfaction. He had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically

unpardonable; for had he not--to gratify his

personal desire for food--levelled a blow at the guardian

spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from

his fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was

only one way by which he could regain the fellowship of

his companions. He must make amends by some public

sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal

for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan)

in a common feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers

and thanks are offered to the animal for the gift of his body

for food. The Magic formula demanded nothing less than

this--else dread disaster would fall upon the man who sinned,

and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred

similar rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology--

the first, in which the individual member simply remains

within the compass of the tribal mind, and only acts in

harmony with it; the second, in which the individual

steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an

action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third,

in which, to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he

submits to some sacrifice, and by a common feast or some

such ceremony is received back again into the unity of the

fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is consumed,

and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh,

the Savior of the tribe.

In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit

is no longer merely an Animal, or animal-headed Genius,

but a quite human-formed Divinity, still the same general

outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered intensity

owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The

Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just

an ordinary Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus

or Jesus. He is betrayed by one of his own followers, and

suffers death, but rises again redeeming all with himself

in the one fellowship; and the corn and the wine and the

wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the

sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper

of reconciliation. It is always the return to unity which

is the ritual of Salvation, and of which the symbol is the

Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of "a new creature

when old things are passed away." For "Except a

man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God";

and "the first man is of the earth, earthly, but the second

man is the Lord from heaven." Like a strange refrain,

and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief

in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation

is a new birth and the beginning of a new creature:

"Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of the liberated god"

--rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a mortal

in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!

Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world

was waiting three centuries before our era (and indeed

centuries before that)? Who was this "thrice Savior"

whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the

meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel

beheld in vision among the clouds of heaven? or of the

"perfect man" who, Paul declared, should deliver us from

the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of

the children of God? What was this salvation which

time after time and times again the pagan deities promised

to their devotees, and which the Eleusinian and other

Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with such

convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy

is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes

beneath the hollow earth: that man knows the true end of

life and its source divine"; and concerning which Sophocles

and Aeschylus were equally enthusiastic?[1]

[1] See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;

also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D.

(London, 1897).

Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already

said, what the answer to these questions is? As with

the first blossoming of self-consciousness in the human

mind came the dawn of an immense cycle of experience--

a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil and

blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely

necessary and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the

return, the restoration has to come through another forward

step, in the same domain. Abandoning the quest and the

glorification of the separate isolated self we have to return

to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed

of this 'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation,

and which all the expressions which I have just cited have

indicated. It is this presence which all down the ages

has been hailed as Savior and Liberator: the daybreak of a

consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than

all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self

is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the

return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation

from the long exile of separation, from the painful sense

of isolation and the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can

we doubt that this new birth--this third stage of consciousness,

if we like to call it so--has to come, that it is indeed

not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a FACT

testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past--

witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic

light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among

the arid and unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms

in the dry grass of a summer night?

Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness

an immense period, as we have said--perhaps 30,000 years,

perhaps even more--has elapsed. Now, in the present

day this period is reaching its culmination, and though

it will not terminate immediately, its end is, so to speak,

in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind

us--say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years--evidence has been

coming in (partly in the religious rites recorded, partly

in oracles, poems and prophetic literature) of the onset

of this further illumination--"the light which never was

on sea or land"--and the cloud of witnesses, scattered

at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and

so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate

a great and general new birth, as now not so very far off.[1]

[We should, however, do well to remember, in this connection,

that many a time already in the history the Millennium

has been prophesied, and yet not arrived punctual to date,

and to take to ourselves the words of 'Peter,' who somewhat

grievously disappointed at the long-delayed second coming

of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his second

Epistle: "There shall come in the last days scoffers,

walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise

of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all

things continue as they were from the beginning of the

creation."[2]]

[1] For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's

remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first

published at Philadelphia, 1901).

[2] 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.

I say that all through the historical age behind us there

has been evidence--even though scattered-- of salvation

and the return of the Cosmic life. Man has never been so

completely submerged in the bitter sea of self-centredness but

what he has occasionally been able to dash the spray from

his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of

heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an

immense antiquity come the beautiful myths which indicate

this.

 Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly.

     hutch;

 Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;

 Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues

     a garment of the sun and stars;

 From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe,

     and is wedded to the prince of heaven.

How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown

close to the Hearth-fire of the universe--herself

indeed just a little spark from it; despised and rejected;

rejected by the world, despised by her two elder sisters (the

body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though latest-born,

by far the most beautiful of the three. And of

the Prince of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her

wedding garment the glory and beauty of all nature and of

the heavens! The parables of Jesus are charming in their

way, but they hardly reach this height of inspiration.

Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange

that here again there are three sisters (the three stages of

human evolution), and the latest-born the most beautiful

of the three, and the jealousies and persecutions heaped on

the youngest by the others, and especially by Aphrodite the

goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of

the unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted

for mortals to look; and the long, long tests and sufferings

and trials which Psyche has to undergo before Eros

may really take her to his arms and translate her to the

heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these

things were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked

to see them, and the poets indeed said, "Happy are

they that see and seeing can understand?" Can we not

understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the

second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing

the lesson that "the greatest of human blessings

is fellowship and mutual trust"?