such as that which followed the standards of Vespasian and on the field of Betriacum greeted the rising of the Unconquered Sun, brought their worship to the banks of the Danube and the Rhine. Settlers drawn 'ex toto orbe Romano,' but more especially from the eastern provinces, were established by Trajan in the newly-won province of Dacia; and Mithras became the principal divinity of the region. Syrian traders, vying with the Jews of the Dispersion in the pursuit of gain, brought with them not only the local Baalim, but also their Persian neighbour, to ports such as Ostia and Puteoli, Ravenna and Aquileia, or penetrated the western provinces by the valleys of the Danube, the Rhone or the Gironde. Slaves, imported by the dealers who carried on their traffic chiefly in Asia Minor, or captured in the various wars with Parthia, found their way into the households of wealthy Romans, or rose, it might be, to posts in the civil service; and it was thus, no doubt, that Mithraism gradually made converts amongst the ruling race and claimed the attention of the Government.

Nero had received the homage of the Parthian prince Tiridates, who having prostrated himself at his feet, addressed him thus: 'I have come to thee as my God, to worship thee even as Mithras, and I will be whatsoever thou shalt decree, inasmuch as thou art my Fate and my Fortune'; but, though the use of the radiate crown-symbol of the Sun-god-dates from Nero's reign, it was not till that of Commodus that an Emperor was counted amongst the initiates of Mithras. Henceforward the epithet invictus,' which to the Eastern mind had a special association with the Sun-god, forms part of the official style of the Emperors. Under the dynasty of the Severi we meet with a 'priest of Mithras the Unconquered in the house of Augustus'; and, though Caracalla professed a special devotion for the Egyptian divinities, Isis and Sarapis, a large Mithreum, only recently excavated, was built within the precinct of his Thermæ. The solar pantheism which Aurelian made the official religion of the state was unlike Mithraism in the pomp and circumstance of its ritual; it was celebrated in a gorgeous temple which was one of the wonders of later Rome, and modelled

on Syrian cults such as that for which Elagabalus had sought to secure a like position. But its doctrines were easily reconciled with those of Mithraism by the ingenuity of an erudite priesthood; and the mysteries celebrated in the spelaa served to supply what the state-cult could not give-emotional satisfaction for the individual and intimate religious fellowship with the members of his congregation. In the reign of Aurelian it might well have seemed that Mithras was about to celebrate the greatest of his triumphs. Less than thirty years later, when Constantine crushed the legions of Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, Sol Invictus' lost his proud title once and for all.

In Christianity Mithraism found a rival with which, as the Christians themselves were not slow to observe, it had some striking features in common. Justin Martyr and Tertullian both suggest that its mysteries were a Satanic travesty of the Christian sacraments. The former compares the Mithraic communion in bread and water with the Eucharist; and in fact we see on the relief of Konjica a table bearing four loaves marked with the sign of the Cross, while the 'Persian' holds in his hand a drinking-horn. But the fancied resemblance does not carry us beyond the simple fact that in both religions. (as in others) a sacramental meal was shared by the worshippers. There is in truth a deeper ground of similarity. In both Mithraism and Christianity the world-process is conceived in dramatic form as a warfare between the heavenly host and that which is enrolled under the banner of the Prince of Darkness; both, therefore, appeal to human nature with an inspiring summons to battle. To the Christian, however, the drama of the Fall and Redemption of Man, briefer in time, is also more intense in its interest, since it is repeated in the history of the individual soul. Mithras, like Christ, bears the name of 'Mediator'; but this is in virtue of a cosmic theory remote from the interests nearest the human heart. The Mithraist, finally, looked forward to a 'faroff, divine event,' when the dead should be raised and a great assize should inaugurate the restoration of all things; he did not, like the early Church, live in hourly expectancy of the return of One who had but lately been caught up from earth to heaven. Nor must we forget

that the intransigeance of Christianity saved it from the alliances and compacts which Mithraism was always ready to make with other, sometimes grosser, forms of nature-worship. It is often said that Mithraism failed because it left women out of account; and although we have seen that there is some slight evidence for the admission of women to the mysteries, the statement is doubtless broadly true. The defect was, however, remedied by alliances with other worships-especially that of the Great Mother, whose chapels were often contiguous with the Mithrea-in which a female divinity was the central figure. Rostowzew has thrown much light on the singular development of Mithraism in the Danube regions, where Mithras is first duplicated and then combined in a Trinity with a goddess who seems to represent an identification of the Great Mother of Asia with the Persian Anahita.

Mithraism did not long survive the establishment of the Christian Empire, which soon ceased to tolerate a hated rival. The process of extermination was, however, interrupted by the reign of Julian, who had been initiated into the Mithraic mysteries in youth and in maturer age composed a prose poem in honour of King Helios,' whose frigid conceits and allegories are redeemed by touches of genuine religious fervour. Mithras now becomes an element in the great synthesis of myth, ritual, and, it must be added, magic (he speaks of the 'blessed miracle-workers'), by means of which the last champions of Paganism sought to preserve intact the heritage to which they clung so passionately. Stoicism had long since given place, as the ruling philosophy, to that of the school which claimed descent from Plato; and this was now led by the Syrian Iamblichus, whom Julian calls later in time than Plato, but not inferior to him in genius.' Iamblichus, an unworthy successor of Plotinus, had interpolated a world of intellectual Gods' between the intelligible and the visible; and of these Mithras, the Mediator,' was a convenient symbol. But to Julian he was more than a symbol. At the close of the 'Cæsares' Hermes addresses the Emperor thus:

6

To thee have I granted to know the Father, even Mithras; and do thou keep his commandments, providing for thyself

a sure cable and anchorage in this life and securing to thyself against the day of thy departure hence, with a good hope, a kindly God to be thy guide.'

Had Julian succeeded in establishing the State Church of his dreams, with an ecclesiastical hierarchy modelled on that of Christianity, a debased Neo-Platonism as its philosophy, and Sallustius' treatise On the Gods and the World' as its catechism, the vocabulary of devotion would have differed but little from that of the Christian. But the project perished with its author.

Sixteen years after the death of Julian an Emperor ascended the throne who earned his title to the epithet of 'Great' by the ruthless and decisive blows which he dealt against heterodoxy and heathenism. The reign of Theodosius put an end to the public practice of pagan rites, which lingered on amongst the obscure tribes of remote Alpine valleys and in the private chapels of that section of the Roman aristocracy which made the Senatehouse the home of lost causes. The coterie led by Symmachus and Prætextatus clung fast to the old creeds; the latter, in the last dateable Mithraic inscription, recounts how, to make assurance of salvation doubly sure, he had not only been initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis but had undergone the blood-bath of the 'taurobolium' and attained the grade of pater patrum in a Mithraic confraternity. We may smile at the pathetic mingling of pedantry and pietism in this clique of reactionary grands seigneurs; but much may be forgiven to the orator who, in pleading for the restoration of the altar of victory in the Senate-house, reminded the Emperor that not by one path alone can the Great Mystery be approached'; nor can we wholly refuse our sympathy to those who, ere the once-resplendent figure of Mithras vanished for ever into the dim twilight of the Gods of Paganism, 'caught the serene surprises' of that setting sun.

H. STUART JONES.

Art. 6. THE LOGIC OF THOUGHT AND THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE.

1. Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge. By Bernard Bosanquet. Second edition. Two vols. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1911.

2. The Scope of Formal Logic. By A. T. Shearman. London: University Press, 1911.

3. A New Law of Thought and its Logical Bearings. By E. E. Constance Jones. Cambridge: University Press,

1911.

4. A New Logic. By Charles Mercier, M.D. London: Heinemann, 1912.

5. Formal Logic. A Scientific and Social Problem. By F. C. S. Schiller. London: Macmillan, 1912.

6. Scientific Method; Its Philosophy and its Practice. By F. W. Westaway. Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1912. 7. The Science of Logic. An Enquiry into the principles of accurate thought and scientific method. By P. Coffey. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1912.

8. Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences. Vol. 1: Logic. By Arnold Ruge and others. London: Macmillan, 1913.

And other works.

'ALL these books on logic, and not text-books either! How strange! Who reads them?' Such will probably be the natural comment of the average man who may have yawned over some elementary text-book at college. The subject was so very uninteresting, so painfully fixed and certain. There was a dry and wearisome discussion of the laws of thought and terms and propositions. Then we passed on to the syllogism with its figures and moods. And there were the familiar lines which remain when their meaning is forgotten :

'Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris ;

Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundis ;'

and so on.

Aristotle wrote a book on logic many centuries ago, and critics and commentators have discussed it ever since. We look at Dr Coffey's volumes and find it all there, what so many generations have learnt. The Oxford man meets it in his 'Greats' course, and occasionally a