duty to provide for the due transmission of this sacred
deposit, that it might be handed on to the future, and the Church might
never be left without teachers: "The things that thou hast heard of me
among many witnesses"--the sacred oral teachings given in the assembly
of Initiates, who bore witness to the accuracy of the transmission--"the
same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others
also."[76]

The knowledge--or, if the phrase be preferred, the supposition--that the
Church possessed these hidden teachings throws a flood of light on the
scattered remarks made by S. Paul about himself, and when they are
gathered together, we have an outline of the evolution of the Initiate.
S. Paul asserts that though he was already among the perfect, the
initiated--for he says: "Let us, therefore, as many as be perfect, be
thus minded"--he had not yet "attained," was indeed not yet wholly
"perfect," for he had not yet won Christ, he had not yet reached the
"high calling of God in Christ," "the power of His resurrection, and
the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His
death;" and he was striving, he says, "if by any means I might attain
unto the resurrection of the dead."[77] For this was the Initiation that
liberated, that made the Initiate the Perfect Master, the Risen Christ,
freeing Him finally from the "dead," from the humanity within the circle
of generation, from the bonds that fettered the soul to gross matter.
Here again we have a number of technical terms, and even the surface
reader should realise that the "resurrection of the dead" here spoken of
cannot be the ordinary resurrection of the modern Christian, supposed to
be inevitable for all men, and therefore obviously not requiring any
special struggle on the part of any one to attain to it. In fact the
very word "attain" would be out of place in referring to a universal and
inevitable human experience. S. Paul could not avoid _that_
resurrection, according to the modern Christian view. What then was the
resurrection to attain which he was making such strenuous efforts? Once
more the only answer comes from the Mysteries. In them the Initiate
approaching the Initiation that liberated from the cycle of rebirth, the
circle of generation, was called "the suffering Christ;" he shared the
sufferings of the Saviour of the world, was crucified mystically, "made
conformable to His death," and then attained the resurrection, the
fellowship