man in all Greece, who could find the way directly to himself and to the mystery and responsibility of his own will without the medium of external rites, to whom there were the ever-present intimations of his strange Divinity,—­what need to him of the Eleusinian revealings or their sublime self-intuition ([Greek:  autopsia])?  He had his own separate tragedy also.  And when with his last words he requested that a cock be sacrificed to AEsculapius, that, reader, was to indicate that to him had come the eighth day of the drama, in which the Great Physician brings deliverance,—­and in the evening of which there should be the final unveiling of the eyes in the presence of the Great Hierophant!

Such were the Eleusinia of Greece.  But what do they mean to us?  We have already hinted at their connection with the Sphinx’s riddle.  It is through this connection that they receive their most general significance; for this riddle is the riddle of the race, and the problem which it involves can be adequately realized only in the life of the race.  To Greece, as peculiarly sensitive to all that is tragical, the Sphinx connected her questions most intimately with human sorrow, either in the individual or the household.

“Who is it,” thus the riddle ran, “who is it that in the morning creeps upon all-fours, touching the earth in complete dependence,—­and at noon, grown into the fulness of beauty and strength, walks erect with his face toward heaven,—­but at the going down of the sun, returns again to his original frailty and dependence?”

This, answered Oedipus, is Man; and most fearfully did he realize it in his own life!  In the mysteries of the Eleusinia there is the same prominence of human sorrow,—­only here the Sphinx propounds her riddle in its religious phase; and in the change from the mystae to the epoptae, in the revelation of the central self, was the great problem symbolically realized.

Greece had her reckoning; and to her eye the Sphinx long ago seemed to plunge herself headlong into precipitate destruction.  But this strange lady is ever reappearing with her awful alternative:  they who cannot solve her riddle must die.  It is no trifling account, reader, which we have with this lady.  For now her riddle has grown to fearful proportions, connecting itself with the rise and fall of empires, with the dim realm of superstition, with vast systems of philosophy and faith.  And the answer is always the same:  “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been is named already,—­and it is known that it is Man.”