Thus chastened and transfigured she won many
hearts far beyond the boundaries of her native land. In that welter
of religions which accompanied the decline of national life in
antiquity her worship was one of the most popular at Rome and
throughout the empire. Some of the Roman emperors themselves were
openly addicted to it. And however the religion of Isis may, like
any other, have been often worn as a cloak by men and women of loose
life, her rites appear on the whole to have been honourably
distinguished by a dignity and composure, a solemnity and decorum,
well fitted to soothe the troubled mind, to ease the burdened heart.
They appealed therefore to gentle spirits, and above all to women,
whom the bloody and licentious rites of other Oriental goddesses
only shocked and repelled. We need not wonder, then, that in a
period of decadence, when traditional faiths were shaken, when
systems clashed, when men's minds were disquieted, when the fabric
of empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous rents
and fissures, the serene figure of Isis with her spiritual calm, her
gracious promise of immortality, should have appeared to many like a
star in a stormy sky, and should have roused in their breasts a
rapture of devotion not unlike that which was paid in the Middle
Ages to the Virgin Mary.
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