The illustration of this group of affinities may conclude with the observation that the most cherished emblem of our creed, the type of the cross itself, had already been in vogue as a religious symbol of certain of the earlier pagan peoples; it played a part in the ancient Egyptian[47.1] and {48} Assyrian ritual, and recently Dr Evans has revealed to us in the Palace of Minos in Crete a chapel of the cross dedicated to the worship of the divine mother.[48.1] We can go no further than the surmise that the propagation of Christianity may have been assisted by the fact that the emblem of the new faith would not appear wholly unfamiliar to some of the converted races. As regards the affinities discernible in respect of hieratic institutions, the organisation of churches, the relations of Church and State, I have only space to cite a few salient illustrations. The earliest Christian Church, a private religious society united by the bond of faith, the members contributing to each other’s wants, with a simple democratic organisation of ecclesia and sacred officials, would not strike the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an unfamiliar phenomenon; for its family likeness {49} to the Hellenic “thiasoi” or brotherhoods of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often been commented on. They, like it, were often proselytisers, and, ignoring the barriers of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle the religious fellowship of man. “It is well to consider all men friends and brothers, as being the family of God,” says Apollonius,[49.1] echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil was ready prepared for the new cosmopolitan religion. In considering the history of the hierarchy in Christendom, we are often obliged to turn our eyes back upon the pre-Christian period. For instance, the insistence on the apostolic succession in the various churches, a primary {50} article of faith with many at the present time, is entirely in keeping with a very old Mediterranean tradition: for we find it not infrequently maintained in Hellenic paganism that the priest should descend directly from the god whom he serves, or from the first apostle who instituted the particular cult or mystery;[50.1] we hear of the priest being qualified “by descent and by divine appointment.”[50.2] But in the earlier religious period the succession or descent was regarded in the linear and physical sense: this has become refined into the idea of a spiritual succession, maintained however by a continuity of physical though mystic contact. Here, as so often in the comparative study of religion, we have to note {51} the physical and material ideas of the more primitive period maintaining themselves in the later but translated into a spiritual significance.