That, reader, is not so difficult to translate into human language.  Thus, from the beginning to the end of the world, do these Mysteries, under various names, shadow forth the great problem of human life, which problem, as being fundamental, must be religious, the same that is shadowed forth in Nature and Revelation, namely:  man’s sin, and his redemption from sin,—­his great loss, his infinite error, and his final salvation.

Sorrow, so strong a sense of which pervaded these Mysteries that it was the name (Achtheia) by which Demeter was known to her mystic worshippers,—­human sorrow it was which veiled the eyelids; toward which veiling (or muesis) the lotus about the head of Isis and the poppy in the hand of Demeter distinctly point.  Hence the mystae, whom the reader must suppose to have closed their eyes to all without them,—­even to Nature, except as in sympathy she mirrors forth the central sorrow of their hearts.  But this same sorrow and its mighty work, veiled from all mortal vision, shut out by very necessity from any sympathy save that of God, is a preparation for a purer vision,—­a second initiation, in which the eyes shall be reopened and the mystae become epoptae; and of such significance was this higher vision to the Greek, that it was a synonyme for the highest earthly happiness and a foretaste of Elysium.

As this vision of the epoptae was the vision of real faith, so the muesis, or veiling of the mystae, was no mere affectation of mysticism.  Not so easily could be set aside this weight of sorrow upon the eyelids, which, notwithstanding that, leading to self, it leads to wandering, leads also through Divine aid to that peace which passeth all understanding.  Thus were the Hebrews led out of Egyptian bondage through wanderings in the Wilderness to the Promised Land.  Even thus, through rites and ceremonies which to us are hieroglyphics hard to be deciphered, which are known only as shrouded in infinite sorrow,—­as dimly shadowing forth some wild search in darkness and some final resurrection into light,—­through these, many from Egypt and India and Scythia, from Scandinavia and from the aboriginal forests of America, have for unnumbered ages passed from a world of bewildering error to the heaven of their hopes.  To the eye of sense and to shallow infidelity, this may seem absurd; but the foolishness of man is the wisdom of God to the salvation of His erring children.  Happy, indeed, are the initiated!  Blessed are the poor in spirit, the Pariah, and the slave,—­all they whose eyes are veiled with overshadowing sorrow! for only thus is revealed the glory of human life!