this title could awaken at least a responsive religious thrill in the hearts of the Hellenes who had been nursed in their ancestral religion. For it had long been attached to their supreme god, and in its feminine form to their beloved goddess Kore, and as applied to her the appellative already connoted “salvation” after death;[33.1] and already it had been used by the Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the divine man, God’s representative on earth, “the {34} living image of God,” as one of the later Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language of the Rosetta inscription.[34.1] But in the history of divine names none have been of greater import for paganism and Christianity alike than “Kore-Parthenos” and that of the Greek and Phrygian “Divine Mother,” the θεῶν Μήτηρ. It is at least probable that the prevalence of the cult and the name of “Kore,” the goddess who proffered salvation in the pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded strong stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of Mariolatry, which is one of those phenomena in the history of the Church which cannot be adequately explained without looking beyond the limits of Christianity proper. A passage in the Panarium of Epiphanios[34.2] is of singular interest for those who wish to study the period of transition between old things and {35} new. This writer tells us that on the night of the 5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, the worshippers met in the sacred enclosure or temple of “Kore,” and having sung hymns to the music of the flute till dawn, they descended by the light of torches into an underground shrine and brought up thence a wooden idol on a bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with the sign of the cross on her brow, her hands, and her knees. And with the accompaniment of flutes, hymns, and dances the image was carried round the central shrine seven times, before it was restored again to its nether dwelling-place: “and the votaries say that to-day at this hour Kore--that is, the Virgin--gave birth to the Eternal.”