In any case, the first-cited passage seems to tell of either a dramatic or a pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in connection with the sacrament; a procedure which would probably not be favoured by the art-hating Jews, but which, gradually developed among the Gentiles in the fashion of the drama-loving Greeks, is the probable origin of several of the gospel narratives. It belonged to the conception of all such mysteries that their details should never be divulged to outsiders; hence the rarity of such allusions, even in letters to the faithful. The Christian cult adopted the very terms of the heathen practice, and its initiates were called mystæ, like those of all the rival religions. A study of the early Christian tombs shows how much of more or less unconscious compromise took place wherever Christism made converts. The charming myth of Psyche had become for Pagans a doctrine of immortality; and in that sense the figure of the child-goddess was without misgiving carved on early Christian tombs. So with the figure of Hermes Kriophoros, Hermes the Ram-Bearer, who is the true original of the Christian conception of the Good Shepherd, in art and in thought, though a figure of Apollo in the same capacity may have been the medium of conveyance. Orpheus was assimilated in the same fashion; and when art began to be applied to the needs of the new cult, Jesus was commonly figured as a beardless youth, like the popular deities of the Pagans in general. Last but not least of the Gentile elements which determined the spread of the Christist cult was the double meaning attaching to the Greek form of the Messianic name. In the unplausible passage above cited from Suetonius, that is spelt Chrestus, evidently after the Greek word Chrestos="good, excellent, gracious," which occurs frequently in the New Testament, and which was a special title of the "infernal" or underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries, also of Hermes, of Osiris, and of Isis. The two words were pronounced alike; and the coincidence is often such as would be made much of by ancient thinkers, wont to lay great stress on words. In the gospel phrase so loosely rendered "my yoke is easy" the Greek adjective is chrestos; as also in that translated: "he is kind towards the unthankful and evil" (Lk. vi, 35); and in the phrase "the Lord is gracious" (1 Pet. ii, 3). In the epistles, too, chrestotes is the word used in the phrase "the goodness of God"; and in the familiar Pauline quotation from Menander "good manners" is in the Greek chresta ethe. Among the Pagans, again, this epithet constantly figured on the kind of tomb called heroon, erected to distinguished persons who thus received the status of inferior deities or demigods, and who in consequence of this very epigraphic formula came in later times to be regarded as Christian martyrs, and to be so celebrated in festivals which were really continuations of the pagan feasts in their honour. The Christians