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Turning now from Town and School to Cloister, to the life of secluded peace and meditation from which, however, the practical issues of life are ever renewed what plainer symbol, yet what more historic or more mystic one can we ask than this of the lamb with the banner?
The mystic allegory with which such modern writers as Lord Bacon have invested the myths of antiquity is no part of their original clothing, but is rather the late product of a style of reasoning from analogy quite similar to that which we shall perceive to have guided the myth-makers in their primitive constructions.
Again, on the same mystic evening girls take nine grains of oats in their mouths, and going out without speaking walk about till they hear a man's name pronounced; it will be the name of their future husband. In County Roscommon, too, on Hallowe'en there is the usual dipping in water for apples or sixpences, and the usual bites at a revolving apple and tallow candle.
On the door is a bas-relief which is very amusing and ingenuous. It represents the meeting of Saint Hubert with the mystic stag, which bears a cross between its antlers.
Wait in these courts until the Eternal Wisdom, who walks within this temple, turns her face upon you, "mystic, wonderful;" and the common places grow refulgent with a new and heavenly beauty, and you humbly say This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. How shall we thus rightly read the Bible, for ethical and spiritual upbuilding?
If, in the great Mystic Unknown, the Eden of Balance, there lies no retributive Cause to right the injustice of that cruel Effect, let us hope there is no Here-after; that we all die and rot like dogs, who know no justice; that what little kindness and sweetness and right, man, through his happier dreams, his hopeful, cheerful idealism, has tried to establish in the world, may no longer stand as mockery to the Sweet Philosopher who long ago said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me...."
One of the things which theosophy teaches is that those transcendent glimpses of a divine order and harmony throughout the universe vouchsafed the poet and the mystic in their moments of vision are not the paradoxes the paronomasia as it were of an intoxicated state of consciousness, but glimpses of reality.
She threw up her arms in uncontrollable rejoicing, and her voice rang sweet and high and clear as she exclaimed: “Ah, he has come at last, the good Prince Radiance! He has not failed me! Think not that your guards can stay him. Think not that your evil friends are able to destroy him. He has conquered them once—he will conquer again. Already you yourself have felt his mystic power.
Yet he finds himself also without his own knowledge or consent surrounded by natural beauty and perfect order he finds nothing in the planet which can be accounted valueless he learns that even a grain of dust has its appointed use, and that not a sparrow shall fall to the ground without 'Our Father. Everything is ready to his hand to minister to his reasonable wants and it is only when he misinterprets the mystic meaning of life, and puts God aside as an 'unknown quantity, that things go wrong.
Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper, and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god.
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