It may be more scientific, and certainly it is at present more expedient, to be content with the assumption that for thousands of years over contiguous human areas a similarity of religious temperament, religious institutions, religious crises may tend to produce a common stock of legend; whether the legend is true or false is not our present concern. I turn now to the second group of affinities, those in nomenclature and terminology. This may at first sight appear a matter unimportant {31} for the evolution of religion, and of merely linguistic concern. A people changing its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, but must adapt the old terminology to the new thought. It may be of interest for the student of language to know that when St Paul promises to “show you a mystery” he is borrowing the language of paganism; that when Bishop Clemens[31.1] ecstatically exclaims, “The Lord is our hierophant; bearing the sacred torch He has marked the initiate with His own seal… once join our mystery and you will dance in the choir of angels,” he is using the phraseology of the Eleusinian and Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a style, upon which Dr Hatch has sufficiently commented, is more than linguistic; for it foreshadows a real though fortunately a temporary change which came over Christianity in the first few centuries of its life, transforming it from an open doctrine into a mystery organised after the old Greek type. {32} Moreover the modern logical view of names as merely indifferent speech-symbols, which can be changed without affecting the essence of the things, was by no means the old-world view. The formula _nomina sunt numina_ was valid in all the old religions of the Mediterranean area, including earlier and even later Christianity: the divine name was felt to be part of the divine essence and itself of supernatural potency; and this will be seen to be of paramount importance when we consider the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore the propagation of a new religion was greatly assisted if it could allow itself to employ some at least of the names potent and familiar in the older creed. Now the personal names of the various deities of paganism, owing to the mental illusion noted above, were necessarily hateful to the new faith and were ruthlessly suppressed, surviving merely as names of demons or for purposes of magic: only in remote corners of the old world one or two may still be lingering, purified as it {33} were and at peace, as in the modern chapel of “Panagia Aphroditissa,” near the old Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred names of Greek paganism were mere appellatives, possessing less individual personality, and were therefore innocent in the ears of the Christian propagandists. And two of these were destined to become names of primary virtue in the terminology of the new faith. When the apostles and their successors preached the Gospel of “the Saviour,”