44 



REV. CANON R. J. KNOWLING, D.D.^ ON 



What was the thought which lay at the root of these great 

 Eastern religions ? It seems to have been that of the triumph 

 of light over darkness, of death issuing in life, incorporated in 

 myth and legend. 



The eclectic Gentile, as Di'. Lake describes him, who would 

 come under the teaching of St. Paul as to the meaning of the 

 death of Jesus, would see every reason for equating the Lord 

 with the Eedeemer-God of the mystery religions. At Antioch, 

 or Ephesus, or Corinth, or Eome, there would be men disposed 

 to listen to the teaching which told of crwrrjpia, which told that 

 the soul could be raised above the perishable and the transient 

 (as the best philosophy would hold) to an actual union with 

 the Divine, and that this union would be effected in those 

 " mysteries " of Christianity which promised the Gospel of 

 eternal life. 



But Dr. Lake makes a great and crucial avowal when he adds 

 that for this salvation of the soul St. Paul's teaching would come 

 to such a man with the advantage that this Kedeemer possessed 

 an historic character which could scarcely be claimed for Attis 

 or Mithra. 



We must omit the famous passage from Sir S. Dill, in which 

 he contrasts the narrative of a divine life, instinct with human 

 sympathy, with the cold symbolism of a cosmic legend. P)Ut it 

 may be worth while to turn for a moment to Herr Gennrich, of 

 P)erlin, who has so well reminded us that the mediator whom 

 Mithraism announced as a Saviour was but the personification 

 of a power of nature, and the redemption instituted by such 

 means was but a myth, devoid of any moral significance, and 

 destined to hopeless failure when placed in the scale against the 

 incomparable attractive power of the historical Saviour and 

 Eedeemer, Jesus of Nazareth. In Christianity that above all 

 which separated man from God was not the unavoidable defect 

 of a finite, earthly nature, but the personal decisive act of the 

 human will against God (Die Lehre der Wiedergeburt, p. 87, 

 1907 ; see, too, on the same contrast between Mithraism with its 

 legends and myths and the historical fact of the Incarnation, 

 Christus : Manuel d'Histoire des Religions, by Professor J. Huby 

 and other French Komanist writers, p. 396, 1912), 



Once more we turn to the writer who has done more than anyone 

 else to give us the salient points in the history and teaching 

 of the religion of Mithra — "It was a strong source of inferiority," 

 so he tells us, " for Mazdaism that it believed in only a mythical 

 redeemer. That unfailing well-spring of religious emotion 

 supplied by the teachings and the passion of the God sacrificed 



