transformation. But many of these words and ideas are obviously the common property of the age. What other words could he have used? What other metaphors than 'the prisoner of the Lord'. . . the armour of God'? The Septuagint and Late Judaism supplied many; the Book of Wisdom, admittedly Jewish, gives the sentence: 'Wisdom is initiate into the knowledge of God,' which reeks in word and content of Mystery terminology. But the similarity is tacitly explained in the latter half of Dr Angus's book, which is devoted to the appeal of the Mysteries, the qualities which caused their general and lasting popularity and diffusion, and the defects, which led, after a moment in history when it appeared that a toss of a coin might decide whether Mithraism or Christianity was to be the future religion of the civilised world, to the ultimate victory of Christianity.

The setting of the Mysteries was wholly conducive to their successful appeal. For centuries the leaven of Orphism had been working in Greek thought; Greek gods who might have offered resistance had atoned for their sharing in the prosperity of the halcyon days of the city states by sharing in their disintegration. The spread of thought and of syncretism was rendered all the easier by the fusion of mankind into one by the world conquest and world statesmanship of Alexander the Great and by the gradual spread of the Empire of Rome. Consequent upon this came the reaction of East upon West, wherein the illusion of the traditional senility of the East became dispelled, while the growth of popular movements and of astrology gave added strength.

Meanwhile, the Græco-Roman world was in a great and desperate need. Out of the ruins of nationalism grew an intense demand for the recognition of the worth of the individual. Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the development of Jewish thought were but the harbingers of what was shortly to arise throughout the known world. The city state was gone; world power centred in one man. The demand for individual values was insistent. And its satisfaction took at first a selfish turn. Men clubbed together in small guilds, and sought there first to realise their own values. But it was a syncretistic age, the greatest bequest of Alexander to history. Cosmopolitanism came into a real meaning, and defined

the illimitability of the Mysteries. They were for all men of all places and times, and themselves antiquated exclusivism and predisposed men to accept salvation wherever most effectively offered. Salvation from some quarter was imperative, for a sense of sin was lowering over the whole human landscape. Greek religion had proved the inadequacy of the natural, Roman religion the futility of a man's expecting to strike a fair bargain with the gods and adequately to fulfil his own part of it. Progressive thought opened up the vastness of the universe and the futility of human psychology. Consequently, a counsel of despair became axiomatic, that dualism was the key to philosophy and asceticism the only rule of life. And as amid all this despair and absence of hope mankind was stretching out hands in longing for the further shore, the Mysteries brought their good news of salvation: Rejoice, mystics, for the god has been saved,' and 'as Osiris lives, so shall his initiate live also.'

Scholarship is divided on the value of the Mysteries; but after giving praise where it is due for their sustaining mankind in its great crisis, it must be conceded that ultimately at all events they proved inadequate to meet the spiritual needs of men. Many of their prayers that have survived are strikingly beautiful, comparable in many cases to Christian liturgiology. But after all, most of their exponents whose witness has come down to us were of the higher kind. Into what the now popular plain man degraded them is another matter and can only be conjectured. Perhaps in this consideration the denunciations of the Early Church were based on fact. Their ethical value is doubtful; there is little evidence to show that it was at all appreciable. They were freighted with myths of primitive naturalism, from which they could never shake themselves free. They were linked with astrology, which lent temporary popularity but proved a dangerous ally, since it opened the way to Determinism and Magic. They fostered an individualistic-mystic form of religion, with its concomitant dualism and ascetic tendencies. And their lack of historical foundation left them weak and vague theologically; while the attempts of thinking men like Apuleius, Celsus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Vol. 248.-No. 492.

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Julian to work out a theology only exposed their weakness the more.

Lucian sneered at the 'gibbeted sophist.' But the Vatican now stands where the last sacrament of the Phrygian taurobolium was celebrated. Where the Mysteries failed to satisfy the needs of mankind, Christianity succeeded. Dr Angus acknowledges all the historic facts that led to the appeal of Christianity, its monotheism, its reasonable dogma, tremendous moral force, and admittedly historical basis, its originality, its compassion, its miracles, and so forth. He then goes on to consider the main factors which ensured its success and permanence. In the first place, while meeting the needs of the age it defied its spirit. Never was there an age more tolerant or a religion more intolerant. Gibbon assigns as the first reason of its success the enthusiasm of the early Christians; and the enthusiasm was one which admitted no other loyalty. It retained the narrow fanatical devotion of its Jewish forbears, and defied the world. It is all very well to insert the caveat that in dealing with St Paul and his converts we have not to consider what they on a priori grounds could or could not do, but what as a matter of fact they did; but it would be strange indeed if, with their so exclusive antecedents and so exclusive descendants, they did in point of fact lend an ear to any such syncretism. There was no doubt in St Paul's mind to whom his allegiance was due, nor was there any such doubt in his preaching. This intolerance may at first have repelled many and attracted the unbalanced, but it soon came to be seen that Christianity was indeed a universal religion, was the universal religion. No other religion has so transcended the barriers that divide classes, races, or intellects.

'Christianity made the double appeal,' says McGiffert, appealing on the one side as a religion with a practical message to every man, low or high, and on the other side as a philosophy, rivalling the great systems of antiquity, supplementing and correcting them, and at the same time assimilating many of their most persuasive features. No movement can spread rapidly and widely unless it appeals to the common man; and no movement can establish itself firmly and permanently unless it wins the thinking classes, the intellectual leaders of the world. Christianity did both.'

Christianity further gave a new meaning to faith. The word 'faith' had always existed, and the idea had played a greater or lesser part in religious thought at all times. But while no use could compare for intensity with the faith of the Hebrew religion, it was only in Christianity that faith as a religious principle came to its full fruition, by being rooted in a new thing, the Person of Christ.

The Mysteries had only legends, solacing and edifying, it is true, but admittedly legends. Isis was addressed by Lucius: Thou dispellest the storms of life, and stretchest out the right hand of salvation to struggling men.' Serapis was philanthropotatos. But neither Isis nor Serapis nor Dionysus nor Cybele could offer the answer to the world's sorrow that St Paul could in preaching Christ crucified. And all along the line it was the Personality of Christ which then as now won men to the new way. The Mysteries were the pedagogues which brought men to the school of Christianity, but they were only slaves. It was Christianity which has given the world what they essayed to give and could not, in Mackintosh's words, 'not by borrowing, or decking itself out in ancient symbols, but by the exhibition of a fact within the field of history, in which were more than fulfilled the inextinguishable yearnings of the world's desire.'

JAMES WALL.

Art. 3.-DID WORDSWORTH DEFY THE GUILLOTINE?

ONCE, at a party in London, Thomas Carlyle, who had not yet cooled down from the white heat in which he wrote his French Revolution,' got William Wordsworth into a corner and 'set him going.' The poet was seventy years old; the historian forty-five. In one or two previous conversations they had disagreed sourly, there had been no free exchange of thoughts, and no liking had sprung up on either side. On this occasion, however, Carlyle avoided literary topics and led Wordsworth on to giving him to giving him account of the notable practicalities he had seen in life, especially of the notable men.' People were always asking Wordsworth, after he became famous and old, what he thought of this or that poet; and between a desire to tell the truth and an uncomfortable feeling that he was being quizzed, he usually made a sad exhibition of himself as an oracle. But of practicalities' and 'notable men' he had seen full many, and the temptation to discourse unreservedly about them to the animated and persuasive Scottish celebrity was too strong to be resisted. And thus a very remarkable thing happened: he was taken off his guard and related to Carlyle an episode of his youth which he had concealed for nearly half a century from all except his wife, his sister, and perhaps a few other relatives or intimate friends.

The episode itself was infinitely creditable to him, a practicality of heroic value, very notable indeed. I mentioned the story eleven years ago in my Life of Wordsworth, calling attention to its significance while admitting that it seemed scarcely possible. Since that time I have been at some pains to learn whether it might not after all be true; and now the case appears stronger than I at first supposed it could be. There was the chance that Carlyle might have misunderstood or incorrectly reported the poet's words; I now feel almost certain that they were accurately recorded. Carlyle goes on to say:

'He had been in France in the earlier or secondary stage of the Revolution; had witnessed the struggle of the Girondins and Mountain, in particular the execution of Gorsas, the first