The conscious opposition no doubt came later, as Deissmann has suggested, when the cult of the Christ went forth into the Roman world and endeavoured to reserve for itself words which had just been transferred to the deified emperors, or had been invented for that worship. "Thus there arises," he says, "a polemical parallelism between the cult of the emperor and the cult of Christ, which makes itself felt where ancient words derived by Christianity from the treasury of the Septuagint and the Gospels happen to coincide with solemn concepts of the Imperial cult which sounded the same or similar."[232] It was inevitable that, as Paul preached Jesus Christ as Lord, the contrast between the Christian worship and the worship of the Cæsars should suggest itself, together with their irreconcilable antagonism. This "polemical parallelism" is probably expressed in such titles as "our only Master and Lord" (Jude 4), "Every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. ii. 11), and "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" (Rev. xix. 16). 232: "Light from the Ancient East," p. 346. 3. The relation of Paul to the Mystery Religions of his time is a topic which has of late been actively discussed. A thesis now widely maintained has been expressed by Loisy in an epigrammatic form: "The mystery of Paul's conversion is his conversion to the mysteries." To discuss the question in all its bearings, one would need a general acquaintance with classical literature, a special knowledge of religious conditions in the early Roman Empire, and, most important of all, a first-hand exegetical knowledge of Paul's epistles. A marked feature of the age in which the Apostle lived was a merging of deities, and the practice of oriental cults side by side with the official Roman religion and the worship of the Cæsar. This syncretism was promoted by the tolerance of an official religious indifferentism, and by a pantheistic philosophy which was hospitable to the worship of a multiplicity of deities as aspects of the One and the All. At a time when the Orontes was pouring its waters into the Tiber, the mysteries of the oriental religions were actively propagated in the West and coalesced with the mysteries practiced among the Greeks. In spite of the labours of philologists and archæologists, our knowledge of the ritual of the various mysteries and even of the ideas symbolized is comparatively slight. It can still be said with Cumont that, "shut out from the sanctuary like profane outsiders, we hear only the indistinct echo of the sacred songs and not even in imagination can we attend the celebration of the mysteries."[233] 233: "Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain," 2d ed., 1909, p. 17; E. T., "The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism," 1911, p. 11.