Paul's doctrine of dying and rising with Christ is ethical rather than "metaphysical" or magical or sacramental. It is surprising to find how little sacramental it is. With no allusion to his own baptism or to the Lord's Supper he says, "I have been crucified with Christ. The world is crucified to me and I to the world" (Gal. ii. 20; vi. 14). "Christ died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor. v. 14). "To know Christ, to be found in him, to be transformed into his death" (Phil. iii. 8 f.). His doctrine is based upon a personal experience of grace, and this is associated with the Cross rather than with the sacraments. The bond which mediated his union with Christ in His death was faith. It was through faith that the Spirit is to be received (Gal. iii. 14), and even when he says, "Christ liveth in me," he adds, "I live in the faith of the Son of God" (Gal. ii. 20, and see Eph. iii. 17). He would gain Christ that he might have "the righteousness of God through faith" (Phil. iii. 9). The Cross and not the sacraments was central alike in the Apostle's experience and in his doctrine of dying and rising with Christ, and the bond of union between him and Christ was faith. There was no mystical absorption of personality as in the Hermetic prayers: "Thou art I, and I am thou." Finally the Pauline mystery was distinguished from the heathen mysteries by its connection with an historical Person. In the Pauline mystery, it has been said, the divine appeared in a "concrete and comprehensible guise," and "this connection of a religious principle with a Person who had walked upon earth and suffered death was a phenomenon of singular power and originality."[243] There is a world of difference between the nature-myths, underlying the mysteries, of the annually dying and rising vegetation gods, without historical reality, and promising to the initiated release from transitoriness and mortality, and the record of Christ who died for our sins, and who being raised from the dead dieth no more. To say that Paul not only conformed the Lord's Supper to the heathen mysteries, but invented it in imitation of the mysteries, is to accuse him of deliberate misstatement; for in a passage of unusual solemnity (I Cor. xi. 23 ff.), he says that he received it of the Lord, and relates the circumstances of the institution of the Supper by Jesus Himself. 243: Bousset: "Kyrios Christos," p. 148.