In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Cæsar as Saviour, God-man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for the Emperor was the most important _sacrament_ of the Church--exactly corresponding to the baptism of the Christians--and it is easy, therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. _All_ these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking of the Persians,[317] the Passover of the Jews, the Lord’s Supper of the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal ceremonies amongst the Mandæans, the Christians, and the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might be regarded almost as sects and orders--a view which would lead to a much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda. All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those founded by the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500 B.C., had been place-bound,[318] and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”; it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and revelations.[319] In the significance of images there came about a very remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all eternity.[320] He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and Julian is his Prophet.”[321] Ten years more, and this Church would have become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but also in important details its very form and content were inherited by Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself