much to answer for. Perhaps it is a dissatisfaction with this portraiture of Christ that aroused a longing to see and hear Him pictured as a man, but more than a man. A task for the greatest of artists, yet only a little while ago one short sentence in an editorial in this magazine lighted up my blindness and I saw the Christ of my dreams. The words occurred in a paragraph of the February number, and they are as sharply defined now as if I had but just seen them. The sentence read: "Christ was Man, not a man." I came nearer to understanding Him then than ever before. He must have felt and looked like you and me, for He was and is you and I, and His life is the epitome of our lives from the cradle to the grave. The little sentence of six onesyllable words was for me a vivid sermon that penetrated to the roots of life.

The history of the Church is another source for sermons that seems overlooked and underestimated. There may be a good reason for it, and quite probably is, for rarely do we hear a word from the pulpit that touches upon the story of our Catholic past. And to this layman such an omission seems a mistake. Mr. Wells and Mr. Van Loon have recently proved that not only can history be taken down from the shelves and dusted, but can be refinished and polished up to such an attractive degree of glitter that what we supposed was scrap metal becomes a best seller in the market place.

The success of Mr. Wells' "Outlines" is not phenomenal at all. It was as natural a thing as that a group of children will nestle about an open fire on a winter night and listen breathless to a teller of tales. Mr. Wells figured his plans skillfully and based them upon the immemorial truth that Homer is always young. He is a shrewd and able business man, and, if we may be permitted to use the phrase of the day, he "put one over," even if his methods were unfair and his facts distorted. To make a best seller out of the history of this disabled planet is a feat that will bring a smile of recognition to the lips of Herodotus' shade in the vales of that Avernus which Mr. Wells denies.

And all this shows that history is not dull, nor dense, but full of life and action and meaning to men and women who are living and striving and wondering through the world. During Lent in a little ancient red brick church in Hudson street a preacher told us on Sunday nights the story of the Saints of the Church

the Holy Fathers who kept the faith alive through the flames and darkness of the early centuries. He recounted their lives and acts in terms of today, and the years vanished and we saw Carthage and the death of the brave old bishop in the public square. St. Ignatius, who knew and spoke with St. John in his old age, became a living figure, and St. Augustine wrote for us his golden book.

No one in the congregation nodded, nor whispered, nor shuffled. They sat by the fire and listened to a teller of tales, and went away with a deeper faith and a warmer love in their hearts for our Mother Church who has borne such sons.

Yes, I should like to hear sermons on the subjects I have sketched, but to read over these pages brings a smile and a shake of the head. How easy to sit at a desk and dictate to the clergy how they should preach—and to whom? In the next apartment lives a man who produces plays. My neighbor at lunch designs and distributes souvenir postcards. My stenographer considers the movies fixed feasts and is a who's who of famous players. Will my tastes in sermons meet theirs? Will they approve of my topics?

Alas, the poor clergy! They will not. This is a complex age and only when the flame of fear lights up the home horizons will the people listen as one man to the preaching of a crusade. Bernard of Clairvaux had a united church and an undivided Christendom to hear him and crusades were not so hard to sell in those simple times. Today but one church can send forth a fiery cross and know the clans will gather. Ours cannot do it. And still I have wondered what might happen if during one Lent our Church, united in her purpose, should preach Christ Crucified, and that alone, to her people for the forty days.

Christ crucified, today. Not two thousand years ago. But today, here, in our own homes, on our streets, wherever men meet and pass and greet one another. What would happen?

T

REV. WILLIAM PHILIP DOWNES

I. The Mysteries.

HE heeding of the cry "Back to Jesus" has resulted at least in an exploration, to an extent hitherto unachieved, of the environment out of which Christianity arose. The Jewish background naturally first attracted the attention of scholars, and the momentous works of Schürer, M. Friedländer, Bousset, Kautzsch and Charles afford a knowledge of the inner-testament period that is indispensable for an understanding of the Jewish side of our religion. Not the less essential is it, however, in order to comprehend the magnitude, the difficulty, and the complexity of the task of nascent Christianity, that one should be critically informed as to the moral, religious, political and philosophical movements of the Gentile milieu with which she came in contact.1

Christianity entered the Graeco-Roman world at a time when it was seething with religious interest. In fact, from, say, 325 B. C. to 325 A. D. the pagan world experienced the profoundest religious awakening in its history. Of this spiritual revival the two most important factors were neo-platonism and the mystery religions. More and more the past was glorified: vetustas adoranda est; in antiquity, dim and mysterious, was the golden age: there was to be found the ripest wisdom and the purest religion; and, consequently, the Orient, had, to the imagination of the time, an extraordinary charm. Thus, in the period of the Roman Empire, immediately preceding and following the rise of Christianity, the Oriental religions found an increasing hospitality: from Phrygia came the cult of Cybele and Attis; from Egypt, the cult of Isis and Serapsis; and from Persia, the cult of Mithra.

It is admitted that our sources for a knowledge of the mysteries are scanty. They consist, for the most part, of Apuleius' "Metamorphoses"; Plutarch's treatise "On Isis and Osiris"; the socalled Hermetic literature; and scattered references in classical

1For a knowledge of the currents of thought of Graeco-Roman paganism the reader is referred to: Paul Wendland, “Hellenistisch-Römisch Kultur"; Boissier, "La Religion romain d' Auguste aux Antonins"; S. Dill, "Roman Society from Nero to M. Aurelius"; T. R. Glover, "Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire"; and Charles Bigg, “The Church's Task Under the Roman Empire."

literature and in the church fathers. Dieterich's "Eine MithrasLiturgie," though it may not be a genuine Mithra liturgy, is yet a valuable document. Based upon the sources modern scholars have given us as intelligible an exposition of the content and aim of the mysteries as we shall probably ever possess.2

The mysteries differ in detail, but they all exhibit certain fundamental traits. That is, a mystery was a rite in which certain "sacra" were exhibited to the worshipper after he had undergone specific purification. Precisely what these "sacra" were has never been divulged. They constituted the "secret" character, the fides silentii object, of the mysteries. The cults, in other words, were "mysterious" not because they conveyed occult knowledge, for that which they taught was known to all, but because the "sacra" produced an ineffable religious-psychological experience. Aristotle said that "the initiates of Eleusis learned nothing but experienced certain impressions and were brought to a certain state of soul."

A mystery consisted of three parts: the initiation, the sacrifice and the scenic representation of the great facts of the natural life and of human life, of which the mythical histories of the gods were themselves the symbols. First, there was the katharsis-the necessary preliminary stage of purification, by washings, fastings, and the offering of sacrifices. Next, there was the actual initiation or consecration-the rite of telete or muesis. Here occurred certain acts of eating and drinking; and the giving of the symbola, the secret formula or password. Thirdly, usually a year after the preliminary initiation, the consecration proper, the epopteia, took place. This consisted of a dramatic representation of the legend or myth of the cult-god, Dionysos, Isis or Mithra, for example. In this final stage the sacra were shown to one's ecstatic contemplation; one became "filled with god," metamorphosized, mystically united with the god, deified.

The chief dignitary of the mysteries was the hierophant, "the

2Fundamental books to consult are: G. Anrich, "Das Antike Mysterienwesen"; R. Reitzenstein, "Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen"; Poimandres; A. Loisy, "Lès Mystères Païens et Le Mystère Chrétien"; F. Cumont, "Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism"; "The Mysteries of Mithra"; L. R. Farrell, “Cults of the Greek States"; Frazer, “Attis and Osiris"; C. H. Moore, "Religious Thought of the Greeks.”

shower of sacred things." He was the grand initiator and he possessed a strong and even voice. Then there were the torchbearers and the hierokeryx, who made the necessary proclamations. The neophyte had his mystagogue, who was not an initiate, but who gave to the candidate the necessary instructions which he must observe preliminary to the initiation.

"The economy of the mysteries," Loisy (op. cit. p. 63) says, "comprised two parts: one of trial and sorrow, even of agony, which took place in the darkness; the other, that of consolation and joy, which took place in the full light and in the society of the gods and their friends, the initiates." Suffering and joy, as they are the notes of all mystic life, so they constituted the totality of the liturgical drama of the mysteries and of the inward experience of the mystes.

The Hellenistic Greek-Oriental mystery religions were originally national or state religions, which, at the time when state religions everywhere had collapsed, were transported into the Roman Empire, and, by a process which is obscure to us, became "mysteries," that is, secret religions of redemption. Whereas the religio civilis, the "established" religion was wholly social and unmystical and one became a member of it by birth; the mystery religions were personal, and their adepts believed themselves called to become initiated in them. If in the Diaspora, the Roman Empire, these religions became denationalized, they became also individualized, universalized, democratized, recruiting their devotees from all ranks of society.

The mysteries were vigorously missionary religions; they inculcated piety of heart; and they professed to provide a way of escape from the ills of this life and to guarantee a blissful immortality in the life beyond. This salvation (soteria, salus) was believed to be effected by means of sacraments that worked ex opere operato. He that had experienced the taurobolium, the blood-bath, for example, was said to be born again unto everlasting life: "taurobolio criobolioque in aeternum renatus". An initiate was believed to have received a character indelebilis; he was said to have become sacratus, renatus, tauroboliatus. In the so-called Mithra liturgy the initiate says at the end of the service:

"O Lord, I have been born again, and depart that I may grow, and having grown I die; through birth that gives life I have been