jSo ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book III. 



This was the moft perfed fyftem, of natural religion, that ever 

 was among men, containing, as we have feen, the fundamental 

 dodrines of our revealed religion j nor do I think, that human 

 reafon, even cultivated as it was among the Egyptians by arts and 

 fciences, could have gone farther. 



To thofe, who were initiated into the greater myfteries, (which 

 was not till four years after their initiation into the lefler; for thefc 

 were confidered as only a preparation for the greater*), was reveal- 

 ed that great myftery of the Unity of God; and that all the Gods 

 of the Greeks and Romans were mere mortal men; — a truth, which 

 the Egyptians did only reveal to thofe who were to govern the ftate, 

 and not even to all the Priefts, but only to thofe who' were moft 

 approved of for their education and learning f. Thofe who were 

 admitted to the greater myfteries, were accounted the happieft of 

 men; and were faid to be born again, and to begin a new life, being 

 reclaimed from an irrational and favage life, and cultivated and miti- 

 gated into humanity^ as Cicero exprefles it; from whence, he fays, 

 thefe myfteries were called initia^ being re vera i)rincipia vitae, the be- 

 ginning of a truly rational life ; and making us live not only pleafantly 

 in this life, but giving us the hopes of a better life hereafter \. Ifocra- 

 tes, in his Panegyric^ fays, that the myfteries are the thing which hu- 

 man nature principally ftands in need of §. And Plato has faid, that 

 the defign of Initiation was to reftore the foul to that ftate from whence 

 it fell, as from its native ftate of perfedion [[. And Proclus, the Alex- 

 andrian philofopher, tells us, that the myfteries and initiations drew 



the 



* See Warburton's Divine Legation, Vol. I. p. 182. 

 f Ibid. p. 190. 



:j: CIccro, De Legibus, Lib. 2. Cap. 14. — AVarburton, uM fiipra, p. 2ro. 

 ^ W'arburton, ubi fiipra, p. 213. where he has given us oi her iiafla^'cb from an tient 

 authors, (hewing the happinefs which the initiated enjo/. 

 11 Plato, in Phaedom \ and Warburton, p. 172. 



