(σύμβολον), which was kept from the catechumens until shortly before baptism. Likewise the Lord’s Supper in time assumed the character of a mystery. Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus, all natives of the East and familiar with pagan mysteries, ascribe an extraordinary efficacy to its celebration. The elements were believed to become the flesh and blood of Christ,[382] or to take on a heavenly nature in addition to the earthly, whereby the partaker gained the hope of eternal resurrection.[383] Ignatius early in the century had called the bread “the medicine of immortality and antidote against death.”[384] As such it had a magic value. If time and subject allowed, we might draw further illustrations of the influence of paganism from the calendar of the Church, which would show how pagan festivals were supplanted by Christian; or we might examine the list of accepted saints, some of whom have heathen origins—others are composites, so to speak; or again we might turn to Christian art and see how pagan types were adapted to Christian uses. But although such studies might prove interesting, we may not enter on them now, for we have already departed somewhat from our proper theme. Yet great as the influence of the pagan environment was on Christianity, there is always a possibility that in such a study as the present we may get a wrong point of view. We should remember that Christianity was a positive religion, which in being transformed into a Greek philosophy did not lose its own character; indeed it was not obscured by the Greek intellectual habit, but it appropriated that habit and in the end made it its own. Pagan thought and practice affected Christianity in countless ways, but they did not overwhelm it. Nor must we underestimate the service which paganism rendered the faith which was to overthrow it. The philosopher’s long search for a rule of life, the Greek and oriental mysteries, and the mystic theosophies, all provided an environment ready and favorable to Christianity. The rapid spread of this new religion, at first in Syria and Asia Minor, was not due simply to the propinquity of these countries to Palestine. They had been for centuries familiar with mystic religions which in a crude way aimed to give what Christianity promised in nobler fashion. The same thing was true in a measure of the great centers of the West. Without an environment already prepared for it Christianity would have had a very different history from the one we know. Moreover we have now abundantly seen how Greek rhetoric and philosophy furnished the forms by which Christianity made itself understood, and how they gave the intellectual weapons by which in part it gained its victory over paganism. * * * * *