series of two hundred years has intervened, a circumstance naturally tending to weaken belief; and because I can ascribe the impression made upon the brain of James to other causes than the imagination of Mary. The royal assassins, headed by her husband, rush with

fluence. We ought not, I conceive, in, physics, to admit of any action taking place without contact, until we have discovered some well recognised and ascertained power which acts at a distance, like that of gravitation, for example, or like that of your thoughts over mine, when you furnish me with ideas. Be-drawn swords into the cabinet where she yond these cases, I at present perceive no influences but from matter in contact with matter.

The fish of my pond and myself exist each of us in our natural element. The water which touches them from head to tail is continually acting upon them. The atmosphere which surrounds and closes upon me acts upon me. I ought not to attribute to the moon, which is ninety thousand miles distant, what I might naturally ascribe to something incessantly in contact with my skin. This would be more unphilosophical than my considering the court of China responsible for a law-suit that I was carrying on in France. We should never seek at a distance for what is absolutely within our immediate reach.

is supping in company with her favourite, and kill him before her eyes; the sudden convulsion experienced by her in the interior of her frame extends to her offspring; and James I. although not deficient in courage, felt during his whole life an involuntary shuddering at the sight of a sword drawn from a scabbard. It is however possible that this striking and peculiar agitation might be owing to a different cause.

There was once introduced, in my presence, into the court of a woman with child, a show-man who exhibited a little dancing dog with a kind of red bonnet on its head: the woman called out to have the figure removed; she declared that her child would be marked like it; she wept; and nothing could restore her "This is the se

I perceive that the learned and inge-confidence and peace. nious M. Menuret is of a different opi-cond time," she said, "that such a misnion in the Encyclopedia under the article fortune has befallen me. My first child "Influence." This certainly excites in bears the impression of a similar terror my mind considerable diffidence with that I was exposed to; I feel extremely respect to what I have just advanced. weak. I know that some misfortune will The abbé de St. Pierre used to say, we reach me." She was but too correct in should never maintain that we are abso- her prediction. She was delivered of a lutely in the right, but should rather say, child similar to the figure which had so "such is my opinion for the present." terrified her. The bonnet was particularly distinguishable. The little creature lived two days.

Influence of the Passions of Mothers

upon their Fatus.

I think, for the present, that violent affections of pregnant women produce often a prodigious effect upon the embryo within them; and I think that I shall always think so: my reason is that I have actually seen this effect. If I had no voucher of my opinion but the testimony of historians who relate the instance of Mary Stuart and her son James I., I should suspend my judgment; because between that event and myself, a

In the time of Malebranche no one entertained the slightest doubt of the adventure which he relates, of the woman who, after seeing a criminal racked, was delivered of a son, all whose limbs were broken in the same places in which the malefactor had received the blows of the executioner. All the physicians at the time were agreed, that the imagination had produced this fatal effect upon her offspring.

Since that period, mankind are believed

to have refined and improved; and the influence under consideration has been denied. It has been asked, in what way do you suppose that the affections of a mother should operate to derange the members of the fœtus? Of that I know nothing; but I have witnessed the fact. You new-fangled philosophers enquire and study in vain how an infant is formed, and yet require me to know how it becomes deformed.

INITIATION.
Ancient Mysteries.

And ticipators in them soon became so. while the number of these was small, it was respected; but at length. having grown too numerous, they retained no more consequence and consideration than we perceive to attach to German barons, since the world became full of barons.

Initiation was paid for, as every candidate pays his admission fees or welcome, but no member was allowed to talk for his money. In all ages it was considered a great crime to reveal the secrets of these religious farces. This secret was undoubtedly not worth knowing, as the assembly was not a society of philosophers but of ignorant persons, di

THE origin of the ancient mysteries may, with the greatest probability, be as-rected by a hierophant. An oath of sescribed to the same weakness which crecy was administered, and an oath was forms associations of brotherhood among always regarded as a sacred bond. Even ourselves, and which established congre- at the present day, our comparatively gations under the direction of the Jesuits. pitiful society of free-masons swear never It was probably this want of society to speak of their mysteries. These myswhich raised so many secret assembliesteries are stale and flat enough; but of artizans, of which scarcely any now remain besides that of the free-masons. Even down to the very beggars themselves, all had their societies, their confraternities, their mysteries, and their particular jargon, of which I have met with a small dictionary, printed in the sixteenth century.

men scarcely ever perjure themselves.

Diagoras was proscribed by the Athenians for having made the secret hymn of Orpheus a subject for conversation. Aristotle informs us, that Eschylus was in danger of being torn to pieces by the people, or at least of being severely beaten by them, for having in one of his dramas This natural inclination in men to as-given some idea of those Orphean myssociate, to secure themselves, to become teries in which nearly every body was distinguished above others, and to ac- then initiated. quire confidence in themselves, may be considered as the generating cause of all those particular bonds or unions, of all those mysterious initiations which afterwards excited so much attention and produced such striking effects, and which at length sunk into that oblivion in which everything is involved by time.

It appears that Alexander did not pay the highest respect possible to these reverend fooleries; they are indeed very apt to be despised by heroes. He revealed the secret to his mother Olympias, but he advised her to say nothing about it-s -so much are even heroes themselves bound in the chains of superstition.

Begging pardon, while I say it, of the "It is customary," says Herodotus, gods Cabiri, of the hierophants of Samo-"in the city of Rusiris, to strike both thrace, of Isis, Orpheus, and the Eleusi- men and women after the sacrifice, but nian Ceres, 1 must nevertheless acknow- I am not permitted to say where they ledge my suspicions that their sacred are struck." He leaves it however to secrets were not in reality more deserving be very easily inferred. of curiosity than the interior of the convents of Carmelites or Capuchins.

I think I see a description of the mysteries of the Eleusinian Ceres, in ClauThese mysteries being sacred, the par-dian's poem on the rape of Proserpine,

tomime, of the same description as we have seen many very amusing ones, in which were represented all the devilish tricks and conjurations of doctor Faustus, the birth of the world and of Harlequin who both came from a large egg by the heat of the sun's rays. Just in the same manner, the whole history of Ceres and Proserpine was represented by the mystagogues. The spectacle was fine; the cost must have been great; and it is no matter of astonishment that the initiated should pay the performers. All live by their respective occupations.

Every mystery had its peculiar ceremonies; but all admitted of wakes or vigils of which the youthful votaries fully availed themselves; but it was this abuse in part which finally brought discredit upon those nocturnal ceremonies insti

Besides, the Cumean sibyl and the de-tuted for sanctification. The ceremonies scent into hell, imitated from Homer thus perverted to assignation and licenmuch less than it is embellished by Vir- tiousness were abolished in Greece in gil, with the beautiful prediction of the the time of the Peloponnesian war; they destinies of the Cæsars and the Roman were abolished at Rome in the time of empire, have no relation to the fables of Cicero's youth, eighteen years before his Ceres, Proserpine, and Triptolemus. consulship. From the "Aulularia" of Accordingly, it is highly probable that Plautus, we are led to consider them as the sixth book of the Æneid is not a de-exhibiting scenes of gross debauchery, scription of those mysteries, If I ever and as highly injurious to public mosaid the contrary, I here unsay it; but I rals. conceive that Claudian revealed them fully. He flourished at a time when it was permitted to divulge the mysteries of Eleusis, and indeed all the mysteries of the world. He lived under Honorius, in the total decline of the ancient Greek and Roman religion, to which Theodosius I. had already given the mortal blow.

Our religion, which, while it adopted, greatly purified various Pagan institutions, sanctified the name of the initiated, nocturnal feasts, and vigils, which were a long time in use, but which at length it became necessary to prohibit when an administration of police was introduced into the government of the church, so long entrusted to the piety and zeal that precluded the necessity of police.

The principal formula of all the mysteries. in every place of their celebration, was, "Come out, ye who are profane;' that is, uninitiated. Accordingly, in the first centuries, the Christians adopted a similar formula. The deacon said, "Come out, all ye catechumens, all ye who are possessed and who are uniniti

Horace, at that period, would not have been at all afraid of living under the same roof with a revealer of mysteries. Claudian, as a poet, was of the ancient religion, which was more adapted to poetry than the new. He describes the droll absurdities of the mysteries of Ceres, such as they were still performed with all becoming reverence in Greece, down to the time of Theodosius II.{ated." They formed a species of operatic pan- It is in speaking of the baptism of the

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G

dead that St. Chrysostom says, "I should be glad to explain myself clearly, but I can do so only to the initiated. We are in great embarrassment. We must either speak unintelligibly, or disclose secrets which we are bound to conceal."

they may be, are accused by the public voice, the falsehood of the charge is urged in vain, and it is deemed meritorious to persecute them.

How could it easily be otherwise, than that the first Christians should be even held in horror, when St. Epiphanius himself urges against them the most execrable imputations? He asserts that the Christian phibionites committed indecencies, which he specifies, of the gross

It is impossible to describe more clearly the obligation of secrecy and the privilege of initiation. All is now so completely changed, that were you at present to talk about initiation to the greater part of your priests and parishest character; and, after passing through officers, there would not be one of them various scenes of pollution, exclaimed that would understand you, unless by each of them,---" I am the Christ." great chance he had read the chapter of Chrysostom above noticed.

According to the same writer, the gnostics and the stratiotics equalled the phibionites in exhibitions of licentious

pollutions with their mysteries, men and women displaying equal dissoluteness.

You will see in Minutius Felix the abominable imputations with which theness, and all three sects mingled horrid Pagans attacked the Christian mysteries. The initiated were reproached with treating each other as brethren and sisters, solely with a view to profane that sacred name. They kissed, it was said, particular parts of the persons of the priests, as is still practised in respect to the santons of Africa; they stained themselves with all those pollutions which have since disgraced and stigmatized the templars. Both were accused of worshipping a kind of ass's head.

The carpocratians, according to the same father of the church, even exceeded the horrors and abominations of the three sects just mentioned.

The cerinthians did not abandon themselves to abominations such as these but they were persuaded that Jesus Chaist was the son of Joseph.

The ebionites, in their gospel, mainWe have seen that the early Christian tain that St. Paul, being desirous of marsocieties ascribed to each other, recipro-rying the daughter of Gamaliel, and not cally, the most inconceivable infamies. able to obtain her, became a Christian, The pretext for these calumnies was the {and established Christianity out of reinviolable secret which every society made of its mysteries. It is upon this ground that in Minutius Felix, Cecilius, the accuser of the Christians, exclaims.

venge.

All these accusations did not for some time reach the ear of the government. The Romans paid but little attention to "Why do they so carefully endeavour the quarrels and mutual reproaches to conceal what they worship, since what which occurred between these little sois decent and honourable always courts cieties of Jews, Greeks, and Egyptians, the light, and crimes alone seek se- who were, as it were, hidden in the vast crecy?" and general population; just as at Lon"Cur occultare et abscondere quid-don, in the present day, the parliament quid colunt magnopere nituntur? Quum honesta semper publico gaudeant, scelera secreta sint.'

It cannot be doubted that these accusations, universally spread, drew upon the Christians more than one persecution. Whenever a society of men, whatever

does not embarrass or concern itself with the peculiar forms or transactions of memnonites, pietists, anabaptists, millinarians, moravians, or methodists. It is occupied with matters of urgency and importance, and pays no attention to their mutual charges and recriminations till they be

The difficulties raised by crities upon this point of history have been all solved by shrewd and learned commentators.

come of importance from their publicity. { The charges above mentioned, at length, however, came to the ears of the senate; either from the Jews, who were implacable enemies of the Christians, Objections have been started in relaor from Christians themselves; and hence tion to the star which conducted the it resulted, that the crimes charged magi from the recesses of the east to Jeagainst some Christian societies were im-rusalem. It has been said, that the puted to all; hence it resulted, that journey being a long one, the star must their initiations were so long calumniated; have appeared for a long time above the hence resulted the persecutions which horizon; and yet that no historian bethey endured. These persecutions, how-sides St. Matthew ever took notice of ever, obliged them to greater circumspec- this extraordinary star; that if it had tion; they strengthened themselves, they shone so long in the heavens, Herod and combined, they disclosed their books his whole court, and all Jerusalem, must only to the initiated. No Roman ma-have seen it as well as these three magi, gistrate, no emperor, ever had the slight- or kings; that Herod consequently could est knowledge of them, as we have al-not, without absurdity, have enquired ready shewn. Providence increased, diligently, as Matthew expresses it, of during the course of three centuries, both these kings, at what time they had seen their number and their riches, until at the star; that, if these three kings had length, Constantius Chlorus openly pro-made presents of gold and myrrh and tected them, and Constantine his son emincense to the new-born infant, his pabraced their religion. rents must have been very rich: that

In the mean time, the names of initi-Herod could certainly never believe that ated and mysteries still subsisted, and this infant, born in a stable at Bethlethey were concealed from the gentiles as hem, would be king of the Jews, as the much as was possible. As to the mys- kingdom of Judea belonged to the Roteries of the gentiles, they continued mans, and was a gift from Cæsar; that if down to the time of Theodosius. three kings of the Indies were, at the present day, to come to France under the guidance of a star, and stop at the house of a woman of Vaugirard, no one could ever make the reigning monarch believe that the child of that woman would become King of France. poor

INNOCENTS.

to these difficulties, which may be consiA satisfactory answer has been given dered preliminary ones, attending the subject of the massacre of the innocents; and it has been shown, that what is impossible with man, is not impossible with God.

Of the Massacre of the Innocents. WHEN people speak of the massacre of the innocents, they do not refer to the Sicilian Vespers, nor to the matins of Paris, known under the name of St. Bartholomew; nor to the inhabitants of the new world, who were murdered because they were not Christians, nor to the auto-da-fés of Spain and Portugal, &c., &c. They usually refer to the young children who were killed within With respect to the slaughter of the the precincts of Bethlehem, by order of little children, whether the number was Herod the Great, and who were after-fourteen thousand, or greater, or less, it wards carried to Cologne, where they are has been shown, that this horrible and still to be found. incompatible with the character of Heunprecedented cruelty was not absolutely rod; that, after being established as King of Judea by Augustus, he could

Their number was maintained by the whole Greek church to be fourteen thou

sand.