2. In time, however, new myths and new forms of worship were added. It is not easy to draw a definite line between the mysteries, strictly so called, and the forms of worship which went on side by side with them. Not only are they sometimes spoken of in common as mysteries, but there is a remarkable syncretist painting in a non-Christian catacomb at Rome, in which the elements of the Greek mysteries of Demeter are blended with those of Sabazius and Mithra, in a way which shows that the worship was blended also.[613] These forms of worship also had an initiation: they also aimed at a pure religion. The condition of entrance was: “Let no one enter the most venerable assembly of the association unless he be pure and pious and good.” Nor was it left to the individual conscience: a man had to be tested and examined by the officers.[614] But the main element in the association was not so much the initiation as the sacrifice and the common meal which followed it. The offerings were brought by individuals and offered in common: they were offered upon what is sometimes spoken of as the “holy table.” They were distributed by the servants (the deacons), and the offerer shared with the rest in the distribution. In one association, at Xanthos in Lycia, of which the rules remain on an inscription, the offerer had the right to half of what he had brought. The feast which followed was an effort after real fellowship.[615] There was in it, as there is in Christian times, a sense of communion with one another in a communion with God. During the earliest centuries of Christianity, the mysteries, and the religious societies which were akin to the mysteries,[616] existed on an enormous scale throughout the eastern part of the Empire. There were elements in some of them from which Christianity recoiled, and against which the Christian Apologists use the language of strong invective.[617] But, on the other hand, the majority of them had the same aims as Christianity itself—the aim of worshipping a pure God, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of cultivating the spirit of brotherhood.[618] They were part of a great religious revival which distinguishes the age.[619] B. THE MYSTERIES AND THE CHURCH.