It would be easy to find many other parallels in St. Paul's epistles, in the Johannine books which are the best commentary upon them, and in the theology of the Greek Fathers, which prove the close connexion of early Christianity with the mystery-religions of the empire. Twenty years ago it might have been worth while to draw out these resemblances in greater detail, even in so summary a survey as this. But at present the tendency is, if not to over-estimate the debt of the Christian religion to Hellenistic thought and worship, at any rate to ignore the great difference between the higher elements in the mystery-religions, which the new faith could gladly and readily assimilate, and the lower type, the theosophy, magic, and theurgy, which was not in the line of Hellenic development, and is not to be found in the New Testament. Wendland, always a judicious critic, has said very truly that St. Paul stands to the mystery-religions as Plato to Orphism; they are not the centre of his religious life, but they gave him effective forms of expression for his religious experience. Or, as Weinel says, 'St. Paul's doctrine of the Spirit and of Christ is not an imitation of mystery-doctrine, but inmost personal experience metaphysically interpreted after the manner of his time.' Writers like Loisy, who say that for St. Paul Jesus was 'a Saviour God, after the manner of Osiris, Attis, or Mithra', and who proceed to draw out obvious parallels between the sufferings, death, and resurrection of these mythological personages and the gospels of the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul's religion was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, who thanks God that he baptized very few of the Corinthians, who declares that 'Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the Gospel', is accused of regarding baptism as 'an _opus operatum_ which secures a man's admission into the kingdom apart from the character of his future conduct'. And yet in the Epistle to the Romans, as Weinel says, 'baptism only once enters his mind, and the Lord's Supper not even once'. Baptism for him is no _opus operatum_, but a ceremony of social significance, a symbol conditioning a deeper experience of divine grace, already embraced by faith. These same critics proceed to illustrate St. Paul's doctrine of the Lord's Supper by references to the religion of the Aztecs and other barbarians. But it is hardly worth while to argue with those who suppose that a man with St. Paul's upbringing and culture could have dallied with the notion of 'eating a god'. The 'table of the Lord' is the table at which the Lord is the spiritual host, not the table on which his flesh is placed.