But let us pause a moment.  It is Palm Sunday!  We are not, indeed, in Syria, the land of palms.  Yet, even here,—­lost in some far-reaching avenue of pines, where one could hardly walk upon a summer Sunday without such sense of joy as would move him to tears,—­even here all the movements of the earth and the heavens hint of most jubilant triumph.  Thus, the green grass rises above the dead grass at our feet; the leaf-buds new-born upon the tree, like lotos-buds springing up from Ethiopian marble, give token of resurrection; the trees themselves tower heavenward; and in victorious ascension the clouds unite in the vast procession, dissolving in exhalation at the “gates of the sun”; while from unnumbered choirs arise songs of exultant victory from the hearts of men to the throne of God!

But whither, in divine remembrance,—­whither is it that upon this Sunday of all Sundays the thoughts of Christendom point?  Back through eighteen hundred years to the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, followed by the children crying, “Hosanna in the highest heavens!” Of this it is that the processions of Nature, in the resurrections of birth and the aerial ascension of clouds,—­of this that the upward processions of our thoughts are commemorative!

Thus was the sixth day of the Eleusinia,—­when the ivy-crowned Dionysus was borne in triumph through the mystic entrance of Eleusis, and from the Eleusinian plains, as from our choirs to-day, ascended the jubilant Hosannas of the countless multitude;—­this was the Palm Sunday of Greece.

Close upon the chariot-wheels of the Saviour Dionysus followed, in the faith of Greece, Aesculapius and Hercules:  the former the Divine Physician, whose very name was healing, and who had power over death, as the child of the Sun; and the latter, who by his saving strength delivered the earth from its Augean impurities, and, arrayed in celestial panoply, subdued the monsters of the earth, and at last, descending to Hades, slew the three-headed Cerberus and took away from men much of the fear of death.  Such was the train of the Eleusinian Dionysus.  If Demeter was the wanderer, he was the conqueror and centre of all triumph.

And this reminds us of his Indian conquest.  What did it mean?  Admit that it may have been only the fabulous march in triumph of some forgotten king of mortal birth to the farthest limits of the East.  Still the fact of its association with Dionysus stands as evidence of the connection of human faith with human victory.  Let it be that Dionysus himself was only the apotheosis of victorious humanity.  In strict logic this is more than probable.  Yet why apotheosize conquerors at all?  Why exalt all heroes to the rank of gods?