Yet such a writer, it is maintained, actually taught that the mere act of baptism conveyed the blessing of a new life and the mere partaking of food and drink conveyed the blessing of communion with the risen Christ. The supposition seems at first sight to be preposterous. If it is to be established, it can only be on the basis of the clearest kind of evidence. The evidence, it should be noted at the start, is at any rate decidedly limited in extent. It is only in the First Epistle to the Corinthians that Paul mentions the Lord's Supper at all, and it is only in Rom. vi and Col. ii. 12 that baptism is connected with the death and resurrection which the believer is said to have shared with Christ. The limited extent of the evidence may in itself be significant. If Paul held the high sacramentarian view of baptism and the Lord's Supper, it seems a little strange that he should have laid so little stress upon the sacraments. High sacramentarians of all ages have preserved a very different proportion. It seems still more strange, perhaps, that Paul should have said that Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the gospel (1 Cor. i. 17). On the _ex opere operato_ view of baptism, baptism was the highest possible function. Could an apostle who held that view have attributed relatively so little importance to it? In order to appreciate how much less importance is attributed in the Epistles to baptism and the Lord's Supper than to certain other elements in Paul's teaching, it is only necessary to compare the references to the sacraments with the references to faith. The fact is perfectly plain. When Paul speaks, in the large, about the way of salvation, it never seems to occur to him to mention the sacraments; what he does think of is the message of the gospel and the simple acceptance of it through faith. These facts are sometimes admitted even by those who attribute a high sacramentarian view of the sacraments to Paul; Paulinism when taken as a whole, it is admitted, is certainly not a sacramentarian religion. What has happened, then, it is supposed, is that Paul has retained in the doctrine of the sacraments an element derived from a lower type of religion, an unassimilated remnant of the type of religion which is represented by the mystery cults. Thus the Pauline doctrine of the sacraments is thought to introduce a glaring contradiction into the thought and life of Paul.