For it explains to all who have ears to hear, what are the real enemies of love which can weaken it in its conflict with death.  The Thracian women, those drunken bacchanals that own no law but their desires, stand for the lawless claim and attack of the lower life upon the higher.  They but repeat, in exaggerated and delirious form, the sad story of the forfeiture of Eurydice.  It is the touch of lawlessness, of haste, of selfishness, that costs love its victory and finally slays it, so far as love can be slain.

In this wonderful story we have a pure Greek creation in the form of one of the finest sagas of the world.  The battle between the pagan and ideal aspects of life is seen in countless individual touches throughout the story; but the whole tale is one continuous symbolic warning against paganism, and a plea for idealism urged in the form of a mighty contrast.  Love is here seen in its most spiritual aspect.  Paganism enters with the touch of lawlessness.  On the large scale the battle was fought out some centuries later, in the days of the Roman Empire, for all the world to see.  The two things which give their character to the centuries from Augustus to Constantine are the persistent cry of man for immortality, and the strong lusts of the flesh which silenced it.  On the smaller scale of each individual life, men and women will understand to the end of time, from their own experience, the story of Orpheus.

It is peculiarly interesting to remember that the figure of the sweet singer grew into the centre of a great religious creed.  The cult of Orphism, higher and more spiritual than that of either Eleusis or Dionysus, appears as early as the sixth century B.C., and reaches its greatest in the fifth and fourth centuries.  The Orphic hymns proclaim the high doctrine of the divineness of all life, and open, at least for the hopes of men, the gates of immortality.  The secret societies which professed the cult had the strongest possible influence upon the thought of early Athens, but their most prominent effect is seen in Plato, who derived from them his main doctrines of pre-existence, penance, reincarnation and the final purification of the soul.  Even the early Christians, who hated so bitterly many of the myths of paganism, and found in them nothing but doctrines of devils, treated this story tenderly, blended the picture of Orpheus with that of their own Good Shepherd, and found it edifying to Christian faith.

One more instance may be given in the story of Apollo, in which, more perhaps than in any other, there is an amazing combination of bad and good elements.  On the one hand there are the innumerable immoralities and savageries that are found in all the records of mythology.  On the other hand, he who flays Marsias alive and visits the earth with plagues is also the healer of men.  He is the cosmopolitan god of the brotherhood of mankind, the spirit of wisdom whose oracle acknowledged and inspired Socrates, and, generally, the incarnation of the “glory of the Lord.”