The vestiges of this ancient conception are to be found, not in the Mystery-religions, but in the ordinary heathen sacrificial worship, in cases where the sacrificial [pg 198] feast has been retained in connexion with it. Here there certainly exists in some form or other the conception of a fellowship with the god set up by eating. It is to be noted that Paul in I Cor. x. draws a parallel between the Lord’s Supper, which unites us to Christ, and these feasts. How expositors have arrived at the idea of making him refer here to the cultus-meal of the Mystery-religions is quite inexplicable. The hypothesis that the earliest Christian conception of the Lord’s Supper in some way represented the surviving influence of an ancient cultus idea, is at first sight much more plausible than the corresponding hypothesis in the case of the Mystery-religions. At any rate the existence of the desiderated fact is here proved. The conception of the sacramental eating stands in the centre of the belief; by this act, fellowship with a divine Being who has died and risen again is maintained; and what is eaten and drunk is brought into relation to the person of Christ, inasmuch as it is called, in some sense or other, His body and blood. Nevertheless in the decisive point the alleged facts break down. Paul knows nothing of an eating and drinking of the body and blood of the Lord. When Dieterich gives it as the Apostle’s view that “Christ is eaten and drunk by the believers and is thereby in them,” and adds that nothing further need be said about the matter, what he has done is, instead of taking Paul’s words as they stand, to interpret Paul through John—and through a misunderstanding of John at that. It is not of an eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ that Paul speaks in the First Epistle to the Corinthians; he always speaks only of eating and drinking the bread and the cup. He assumes, no doubt, that this somehow or other maintains a communion with the body and blood of Christ (I Cor. x. 16-17), and that anyone who partakes unworthily sins against the body and blood of the Lord (I Cor. xi. 27). He quotes, too, the words [pg 199] in which the Lord, on the historic night, after the Supper, speaks of bread and wine as His body and His blood. But the conception which seems inevitably to arise out of this, that the participant partakes of the body and blood of the Lord, is not found in him.