When Christianity spread among the Gentiles, it at once came under influences which inevitably left their marks in its thought and practice. Let me offer two illustrations. Early in the hour I spoke of Aeneas’ journey through the lower world as an initiation by which he was enlightened and strengthened for the great task that lay before him; and we have now seen that in all the mysteries, both Greek and oriental, there were initiatory rites, in which the novice symbolically died to the old life and was born again into a new existence. Moreover, through his emotional experience he received assurance that his salvation was secure forever. The idea of the new birth belongs to Christianity also from the first. Paul held that it was brought about by faith; the author of the Fourth Gospel taught that it was secured by love and belief. Baptism in primitive Christianity was at first symbolical--an act of ritual purification, which was believed to indicate the remission of sins and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.[37] But by the second century Christianity had become a mystery in the Greek sense, into which the novice, after a period of preparation, was duly initiated by baptism; and indeed the act was believed to have a magic power to secure immortality, closely parallel to that of the pagan initiation.[38] We all know that the ecclesiastical confidence which such belief inspires is far from unknown today. Again you will recall that when Anchises’ shade was instructing Aeneas in the meaning of life and death, he said: “Nor when to life’s last beam they bid farewell May sufferers cease from pain, nor quite be freed From all their fleshly plagues; but by fixed law, The strange, inveterate taint works deeply in. For this, the chastisement of evils past Is suffered here, and full requital paid. Some hang on high, outstretched to viewless winds; For some their sin’s contagion must be purged In vast ablution of deep-rolling seas, Or burned away in fire. Each man receives His ghostly portion in the world of dark.”