What are the results to which the students of Comparative Religion have to point in regard to the Lord’s Supper? They are obliged at the outset to give up the [pg 207] attempt to explain it from the Mystery-religions, or even to point out in the latter any very close analogies. In place of this they attempt to make intelligible both the meal which formed part of the mystery-cults, and that of Pauline Christianity, as growths which, from scattered seeds of ancient conceptions of the cultus-eating of the divinity, spring up from the soil of syncretism in two different places at the same time. Neither in the one case nor the other, however, can they render this even approximately probable. Up to the present, therefore, neither a direct nor an indirect connexion between the cultus-meal of Paul and those of the Mystery-religions has been shown. The only thing which is certain is that in both cases a cultus-meal existed. About that of the Mysteries we know almost nothing; about that which Paul presupposes we have more information, but not such as to enable us at once to understand it. The question regarding baptism took from the first a simpler form, since the hypothesis of a renascence of primitive cultus-conceptions has not to be considered. Both Paul and the Mystery-religions attach a religious significance to washings. That, however, does not suffice to establish a peculiarity which would connect them together, since the attachment of this significance to lustration is bound up with the elemental symbolism of cleansing and is found more or less in all religions. The real question is whether Paulinism and the Mystery-religions, when they go beyond the most general notions, and advance from the symbolic to the effectively sacramental, follow the same lines and present the same views. Once again, Paul’s view is the more fully, that of the Mystery-religions the less fully known. Developed baptismal doctrines and rites seem only to have been present in the Egyptian cults. These distinguish between the bath of purification and baptism, the latter consisting [pg 208] in a sprinkling with a few drops of a consecrated and consecrating fluid._(_170_)_ The advance beyond the idea of purification, where it is to be observed, moves in the direction of the idea of Re-birth, Regeneration. A clear formulation of this developed view—comparable in definiteness with the Early Christian reference to the “bath of regeneration” _(_171_)_ —does not occur. The thought remains hovering between purification and renewal. That is as much as to say that, so far as our information goes, no typical points of contact with Paulinism present themselves.