The ideas of remote savages concerning the proper manner of initiating youth in the religious and other mysteries of life may seem of little personal assistance to superiorly civilized people like ourselves. But let us turn, therefore, to the Greeks. They also had preserved the idea and the practice of initiation into sacred mysteries, though in a somewhat modified form because religion had ceased to be so intimately blended with all the activities of life. The Eleusinian and other mysteries were initiations into sacred knowledge and insight which, as is now recognized, involved no revelation of obscure secrets, but were mysteries in the sense that all intimate experiences of the soul, the experiences of love quite as much as those of religion, are mysteries, not to be lightly or publicly spoken of. In that feeling the Greek was at one with the Papuan, and it is interesting to observe that the procedure of initiation into the Greek mysteries, as described by Theon of Smyrna and other writers, followed the same course as the pubertal initiations of savages; there was the same preliminary purification by water, the same element of doctrinal teaching, the same ceremonial and symbolic rubbing with sand or charcoal or clay, the same conclusion in a joyous feast, even the same custom of wearing wreaths. In how far the Christian sacraments were consciously moulded after the model of the Greek mysteries is still a disputed point;[175] but the first Christians were seeking the same spiritual initiation, and they necessarily adopted, consciously or unconsciously, methods of procedure which, in essentials, were fundamentally the same as those they were already familiar with. The early Christian Church adopted the rite of Baptism not merely as a symbol of initiation, but as an actual component part of a process of initiation; the purifying ceremony was preceded by long preparation, and when at last completed the baptized were sometimes crowned with garlands. When at a later period in the history of the Church the physical part of the initiation was divorced from the spiritual part, and baptism was performed in infancy and confirmation at puberty, a fatal mistake was made, and each part of the rite largely lost its real significance.