Collected Works (Vol. III)

ELEUSIS 225 the only instance in the world’s history of more than two people in one place being of one accord, it is naturally also the only instance of a miracle which happened in church. The Quakers, arguing soundly enough that women were such a cause of contention chiefly on account of their tongues, and getting a glimpse of these truths which I have so laboriously been endeavouring to expound, hoped for inspiration from the effects of silence alone, and strove (even by a symbolic silence in costume) to repeat the experiment of Pentecost. But they lacked the stimulus of Syrian air, and that of the stirring times of the already visible sparks of national revolt: they should have sought to replace these by passing the bottle round in their as- semblies, and something would probably have happened, an ’twere only a raid of the police. Better get forty shillings or a month than live and die as lived and died John Bright ! Better be a Shaker, or a camp-meeting homunculus, or a Chatauqua gurl, or a Kes- wick week lunatic, or an Evan Roberts revivalist, or even a common maniac, than a smug Evangelical banker’s clerk with a greasy wife and three gifted children—to be bank clerks after him ! Better be a flagellant, or one who dances as David danced before the Lord, than a bishop who is universally respected, even by the boys he used to baste when he was headmaster of a great English public school ! That is, if religion is your aim: if you are spiritually minded: if you interpret every phenomenon that is presented to your sen- sorium as a particular dealing of God with your soul. But if you come back from the celebration of the Eucharist and say, ‘‘ Mr. Hogwash was very dull to-day,” you will never get to heaven, where the good poets live, and nobody else ; nor to hell, whose inhabitants are exclusively bad poets. There is more hope for a man who should go to Lord’s and say he saw the angels of God ascending and descending upon C. B. Fry. It is God who sees the possibility of Light in Chaos ; it is the Churches who blaspheme the superb body of Truth which Adepts of old enshrined in the Cross, by degrading the Story of the Crucifixion to a mere paragraph in the Dazly Afail of the time of Pontius Pilate. Bill Blake took tea with Ezekiel: Tenny- son saw no more in the Arthurian legends than a prophecy of the Prince Consort (though Lancelot has little in common with John Brown), and the result of all is that Tennyson is dead and buried—as shown by the fact that he is still popular —and Blake lives, for poets read and love him. Now when Paganism hecame_ popular, organised, state-regulated, it ceased to be individual: that is to say, it ceased to exist as a religion, and became a social institu- tion little better than the Church which has replaced it. But initiates—men who had themselves seen God face to face, and lived —-preserved the vital essence. They chose men; they tested them; they. instructed them in methods of invoking the Visible Image of the Invisible. Thus by a living chain religion lived—in the Mysteries of Eleusis. Further, recognising that the Great Work was henceforth to be secret, a worship of caverns and midnight groves and catacombs, no more of open fields and smiling bowers, they caused to be written in symbols by one of the lesser initiates the whole Mystery of Godliness, so that after the renaissance those who were fitted to the Work might infallibly discover the first matter of the Work and even many of the processes thereof. Such writings are those of the neo- Platonists, and in modern times the God- illumined Adept Berkeley, Christian though he called himself, is perhaps the most dis- P