Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/54

46 a recent writer, "of undoubtedly Oriental origin, and for centuries common enough in Greece and Asia Minor, were apparentlyintroduced into Etruria by a Greek adventurer, and from there spread with extreme rapidity both in Italy and Rome. At first women only were admitted into the secret associations which formed the basis of the cult; the initiation took place by day, and the meetings were only held three times a year. But all this was now changed; men were initiated as well as women; the initiated were to be under twenty years of age. Meetings were held five times in every month, and took place under the secrecy of night. The inevitable enormities did not fail to follow, and the Bacchic associations became hotbeds not only of moral corruption, but of civil crimes such as forgery and murder and even of political conspiracy." Attention having been called to these abuses, the Senate acted vigorously, and the Bacchic rites were stamped out with great severity ( 188). A century later, the same writer tells us, the Roman Government was confronted with the Isis cult, but was not able to deal with it in the same energetic fashion, owing to the fact that the national religion had largely lost its hold upon the people. "Mysterious rites of initiation," we read, "sensuous music, a worship crowded with symbolism no less awe-inspiring that it was imperfectly or not at all understood; and above all, a system of expiatory and purificatory rites in which there was enough of asceticism to satisfy the craving for something personal in religion, and enough of license to attract the crowd in its non-religious moods, all these things made the population of Rome peculiarly susceptible to the influence of cults like the Egyptian."

What bearing have these historical instances, it may be asked, on the subject in hand? A tolerably direct bearing, we think, as tending to show that if there is anything that needs to be watched and criticised, anything the claims of which to prescribe conduct or to limit knowledge need to be challenged and examined, it is precisely religion in its varying forms and phases. Religion, to go back to Mr. Kidd's definition, provides an ultra-rational sanction for socially useful actions; but when, let us ask, has religion been content with enjoining the performance of such actions on the strength of its ultra-rational sanction? It is true that an apostle has beautifully said, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world"; but this is merely the utterance of a profound individual intuition, not the expression of what, historically, religion has ever been.