This is the month of the Spring Equinox, when great things happen in the heavens, when in the ancient world worshippers were conscious of some terrific event in the lives of the gods. It was the month when the sun’s brightness triumphed over the winter, when the curse of the sterile earth was removed, and life and birth and joy and fruitfulness came back into the fields. The old astrologer-astronomers read the doings of more than the material heavens in the slow Procession of the Equinoxes. When Taurus was the dominant sign, then it was the bull-headed God who triumphed over his enemies—Marduk, the bull of heaven, vanquished Tiamtu, the dragon of the great deep, and in Assyria winged bulls were among the gods, with mild human faces. Then, when after five hundred years the sign changed, and Aries was ruler of the Spring Equinox, came the reign of the ram-headed gods, of Jupiter Ammon and the gods of Egypt. The Spring saviour became a ram—a lamb ... “the sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens.”... But in none of these early conceptions of a triumphant god overthrowing the powers of darkness was the victory won without blood. Tammuz, Adonis, Baldur, Osiris, Orpheus—all were slain—all bowed whether finally or temporarily, to the powers of the underworld and of darkness. Till at last pagan religion reached its height, its final climax in preparation for the Gospel—in the idea of the victim whose death brought life into the world. It was not only in Judea that the conception of the Suffering Servant prepared men’s minds for the coming of Christ. Long before the time of Christ men had begun to rationalise the processes of suffering. They no longer fought the cruelties of their environment—the evil and pain of life—as beasts or as children. Both will and understanding were striving to take their share in the conflict. Philosophers built up systems on the idea of pain; and the popular religions dealt with it symbolically in their sacrificial rites; the mystery religions made it the centre of their arcana. All looked forward, however dimly, to a deliverance from suffering. The stoics sought to overcome it through enduring it, the epicureans through ignoring it; the popular religions fell back on the idea of propitiation—on the conciliation of an anthropomorphic god who might be appeased into sparing; the mystery religions saw as in a glass darkly the God himself becoming the deliverer from the evils of the human process in which he too had a share.