the life into which the candidates were about to enter.
Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels
that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course
correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its
ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries)
are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on
the immensely important subject of Sex is omitted, the details of social
and industrial morality are passed by, and instruction is limited to a
few rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.

It may be appropriate here, before leaving the subject of the Second
Birth, to inquire how it has come about that this doctrine--so remote
and metaphysical as it might appear--has been taken up and embodied in
their creeds and rituals by quite PRIMITIVE people all over the world,
to such a degree indeed that it has ultimately been adopted and built
into the foundations of the latter and more intellectual religions, like
Hinduism, Mithraism, and the Egyptian and Christian cults. I think the
answer to this question must be found in the now-familiar fact that the
earliest peoples felt themselves so much a part of Nature and the animal
and vegetable world around them that (whenever they thought about these
matters at all) they never for a moment doubted that the things which
were happening all round them in the external world were also happening
within themselves. They saw the Sun, overclouded and nigh to death in
winter, come to its birth again each year; they saw the Vegetation
shoot forth anew in spring--the revival of the spirit of the Earth; the
endless breeding of the Animals, the strange transformations of Worms
and Insects; the obviously new life taken on by boys and girls at
puberty; the same at a later age when the novice was transformed into
the medicine-man--the choupan into the angakok among the Esquimaux, the
Dacotah youth into the wakan among the Red Indians; and they felt in
their sub-conscious way the same everlasting forces of rebirth and
transformation working within themselves. In some of the Greek Mysteries
the newly admitted Initiates were fed for some time after on milk only
"as though we were being born again." (See Sallustius, quoted by Gilbert
Murray.) When sub-conscious knowledge began to glimmer into direct
consciousness one of the first aspects (and no doubt one of the truest)
under whi