Old

ideas as well as old terms clung to it, and very slowly changed their meaning. The words of Christ: “except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood ” (though spoken we are told in life), had a special significance to those who believed that only by some such rite could worshiper and deity establish communion (see Sacrifice). Dr Trumbull (Primitive Blood Covenants, p. 128) cites an extreme case: the Huron Indians, in N. America, rashed upon a Jesuit mi ionary whose qualities they admired: drank the warm blood from his veins; and their chief tore out and devoured the heart. So too the ignorant convert thought of the Christian eucharist. Even the Jews held that it was expedient that one should die for the people—and better Jesus than Barabbas (see Rivers of Life, ii, pp. 345-350; and Frazer's Golden Bough). From old Pagan rites (said Mr Clodd, Folk Lore Society, Jan. 1896), “ arose the doctrine of Transubstantiation ” [we trace it in the Haoma worship of Mithra, and in the mystic philosophy of the Bhagavad — Gita in India.—Ep.]. Legends of virgin birth, and other wonders, — ‘ naturally belonged to the same system. The world was already weary of being told of endle incarnations—of sun gods who suffered temptations and sorrows, and who died at times for the good of mankind—when the new faith was preached by Paul in Athens (see Wilkinson’s Ancient Egtns., i, p. 278). The educated Egyptian spiritualised the legend of the death and resurrection of Osiris, as the Gnostik explained the story of Christ to be allegorical; but, to the ma es, these were real divine beings, who would return to establish a heavenly kingdom. Athenagoras, however, owned that “ he laughed gaily at the Egyptian absurdity in weeping for the death of their god, rejoicing at his resurrection, and then sacrificing him as a divinity.” As the older faith celebrated the birth of Osiris, and his triumph over the dark Set, so the younger hailed its Christ, born at Bethlehem in the sun god’s cave (see Bethlehem), and said that he had conquered Satan (see Perrin’s Keligion of Philosophy, chap. xviii: Bonwick’s Lgt. Beliefs: Clarke's Ten Great Religions, .). Among Greeks, Alexander the Great and Plato alike were held to be sons of divine fathers (Rev. F. C. Conybeare, 1895). The Pagan origin of Christian emblems and vestments is generally admitted. The cro (see Cro es) is a very ancient sacred sign. The Abbé Hue (Hazlitt’s translation, vol! i, p. 50) was astonished by recognising the cro , the mitre, the dalmatic, and cappa, among the Lamas of Tibet; by their services with double choirs, swinging censers, rosaries, benedictory gestures, and chaplets: by their celibacy and spiritual retreats, monastic vows, saint worship, images, proce ions, and holy water. He saw in the Dalai Lama a “ Buddhist Pope,” and in the apses of their temples a resemblance to our churches, Father Bury, an earlier mi ionary, when first he “saw the Chinese Bonzes tonsured, using rosaries, praying in an unknown tongue, aud kneeling before images, exclaimed, ‘There is not a piece of dre , not a sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the court of Rome, which the Devil has not copied in this country’” (Perrin’s Relig. of Philosophy, p. 439). The Spaniards in Mexico were equally astonished by similar parallels (see Azteks). But, as we wrote in 1880 (Rivers of Life, introd.), men under like circumstances evolve similar ideas and rites, and we need not insist on such comparisons as evidence of direct copying, unle as between faiths in countries immediately adjacent. All these symbols, myths, and customs, have apparently a very ancient common origin in Asia, In spite of all attempts on the part of the educated, the ma es persist in preserving mitres and croziers, cro es, and spires, in ignorance of what these symbols once meant. “Apart from the New Testament,” says the author of Christian Origins (Antiqua Mater, 1887), “the historical origin of the faith must be sought primarily in Justin Martyr’s accepted works” (see Bible). But Patristic literature does not help us much. The Ebionites, in the 2nd century, discarded the two first chapters of Matthew's Gospel, and Marcion discarded the two first chapters of Luke's Gospel, like some of our present Church dignitaries. The famous pa age in Josephus (Ant., XVIII, iii, 3), which speaks of Christ, was rejected by Gibbon as it is by modern critics (Hneyel. Brit., 1881, xiii, 752). ‘‘ Now there was about this time (18 a.c.) Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man.... He was the Christ... (and was) condemned to the cro .” These words come in abruptly, after describing a “seditious” rising due to Pilate’s bringing water in an aqueduct to Jerusalem, and they interrupt the narrative so as to be apparently a later interpolation. We are reduced therefore, for early external evidence, to Pliny’s letter (103 a.c.) to the Emperor, as to Christians in Pontus; and to the notice in Tacitus (of the same period) concerning the Christians whom Nero martyred in 65 ac. 471