TOTEMISM IN THE EVOIUTION OF THEOLOGY. 403 



of bread and wine was a prominent feature in the worship of 

 Mithras. 



" There is a remarkable syncretist painting in a non-Christian 

 catacomb in which the elements of the Greek mysteries of Deme- 

 ter are blended with those of Sabazius and Mithra, in a way which 

 shows that the worship was blended also." The most important 

 rite of all these antique mysteries being the Eucharist, led the cele- 

 brated Cicero to exclaim, " Can a man be so stupid as to imagine 

 that which he eats to be a god ? " It has required a great effort for 

 intelligent minds in all ages to reconcile their imaginations to the 

 bloody ritual so prominent in all religious ceremonies from the 

 earliest age. It is a relief to refined and spiritual natures to be 

 able to look down the long ages of time and see that the early rite 

 from which each evolved was instituted by savage peoples, and 

 celebrated in their ignorant worship of animals. 



It is a self-evident truth that " the ideas which the religious 

 instinct has once grasped it seldom abandons " — consequently 

 there are countless survivals along the entire line of religious 

 progress, of beliefs and customs belonging to lower planes of cul- 

 ture, which have been, as far as possible, adapted to higher sys- 

 tems by giving them new names or more spiritual explanations. 

 To this cause must be ascribed the fact — so evident to all students 

 of comparative theology — of the early Christian Church becoming 

 incrusted with the rituals and religious customs of the pagan 

 world. The late Dr. Hatch, in the Hibbert Lectures of 1888, 

 demonstrated, in the most convincing manner, " the influence of 

 Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian Church."' Every 

 thoughtful person who has made even a slight study of this all- 

 important subject is compelled to unite with him in saying : 

 " Greece lives — not only its dying life in the lecture-rooms of uni- 

 versities, but also with a more vigorous growth in the Christian 

 churches. It lives there, not by virtue of the survival within 

 them of this or that fragment of ancient teaching, and this or that 

 fragment of an ancient usage, but by the continuance in them of 

 great modes and phases of thought, of great drifts and tendencies, 

 of large assumptions. . . . No sooner is any new impulse given, 

 either to philosophy or religion, than there arises a class of men 

 who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo 

 of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with 

 Christianity. It came into the educated world in the simple dress 

 of a prophet of righteousness. It won that world by the stern 

 reality of its life, by the subtile bonds of its brotherhood, by its 

 divine message of consolation and hope. Around it thronged the 

 race of eloquent talkers, who persuaded it to change its dress and 

 to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby to 

 win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest 



