In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity, still the same general outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed by one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again redeeming all with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the wine and the wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation. It is always the return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and of which the symbol is the Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of "a new creature when old things are passed away." For "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God"; and "the first man is of the earth, earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven." Like a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a new birth and the beginning of a new creature: "Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of the liberated god"--rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all! Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world was waiting three centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was this "thrice Savior" whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel beheld in vision among the clouds of heaven? or of the "perfect man" who, Paul declared, should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally enthusiastic? (1) (1) See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194; also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London, 1897).