The great feature of the Jewish Feast of the Passover being the eating of a lamb "before the Lord," that usage would in Jewish circles be preferred to, or at least combined with, the sacrament of bread and wine, "Ceres and Bacchus," which was perhaps commonest among the Gentiles. In the legend of Abraham and Melchisedek, priest of the Phoenician God El Elyon, there figures a sacramental meal of bread and wine (Gen. xiv, 18); and in the non-canonical book of Ecclesiasticus there is a passage (l, 15) which suggests a use of wine as symbolical of blood. The "shew-bread," too, seems to have had a measure of sacramental significance. But while such a rite would seem to have flourished in the background of Judaism, that of the Passover was one of the great usages of the Jewish world, and the first Jesuists clearly held by it. It is indeed one of the hierological probabilities that the paschal lamb was anciently "Jeschu" or Jesus, the springtide symbol of a Sun-God so named; for in the book of Revelation, which is markedly Judaic, "the Lamb" figures as the known symbol or mystic name of a Son of God "slain from the founding of the world," and identified with a mystic Jesus who is one with Jehovah--this apparently long before the Christian cult in general had arrived at such a doctrine. There is a mythological presumption that such language had reference to the fact--dwelt on by later Jewish writers--that the date of the Passover fell at the entrance of the sun into the constellation Aries in the zodiac; and the rule that the paschal lamb must be roasted, not boiled, tells also of the sun-myth. Yet again, the lamb is the animal latterly substituted in the myth of Abraham and Isaac for the sacrificed only-begotten son Isaac, whose name in the Hebrew (Yischak) comes somewhat near to the common form of the name Jesus (Yeschu), and who is mythologically identifiable as a Sun-God. In any case, "the Lamb slain for us" in the Apocalypse implies a recognized sacrament of lamb-eating, such as that of the Passover, which was anciently the time for sacrificing first-born sons (Ex. xxii, 29), and which is explained even in the priestly myth as a commemoration of the sparing of the first-born of Israel when the first-born of Egypt were divinely destroyed. To such a national precedent the Hebrew Jesuists would tend to cling as they did to the practice of circumcision.