follow him? Paul's Epistles bear witness to churches or communities which had been long in existence when he visited them. He has no affinity with churches or communities that were based upon the tradition of a historical Jesus such as we have in the synoptic Gospels; but he has a very close affinity with those other churches or communities which believed in a mystic Christ, and whose technical terms were all derived from the Gnosticism which recent research has shown to be pre-Christian. Paul was not converted to a belief in a historical Jesus; he was changed from being an official persecutor of the messianic sects to a preacher of a mystic Christ or spiritual messiahship, which he did not derive from man. The Christ he preached was born of his own immediate experience and revelations. He did not go through the cities of the Mediterranean, Corinth, Ephesus, Colosse, and the province of Galatia, proclaiming that a great teacher had appeared in Palestine, and quoting from his teachings. His Epistles being witness, Paul lived in a different world from the Evangelists, and dealt with different subjects. The "Jesus Christ" with whom Paul deals in his Epistles is one who never did anything, never wrought a miracle, never performed a deed of mercy, and never uttered a word of teaching, but simply died and rose from the dead. That is to say, the Christ of the Pauline letters is not the Jesus of the Gospel story. The incidents of the Gospels are not the mental and spiritual background of his words and phrases, and give no clue to his meaning. What emerges clear as daylight from Paul's Epistles is that the churches or communities he established as well as those he found already established when going on his missionary journeys, were not communities organized around a historical Jesus; they were of a mystic nature resembling the Therapeutae of whom Philo speaks, or the Essenes, people devoted to the cultivation of the life of contemplation and of union with

God. It is not an unlikely assumption that it was with one of those communities that Paul spent his time after his conversion, and that it was the light and inspiration he received from that source which emboldened him to be the apostle he afterwards became. What we have in the synoptic Gospels is, in parts, teaching inferior, that is, lower in spiritual tone and insight than that current in the mystic sects to which Paul belonged and ministered. They believed in a Saviour who was a heavenly being; belief in the Logos was a fundamental part of their creed.

Paul's real background is the teachers of Greece and not the synoptic Gospels-the teachers of Greece as modified by the wisdom of Egypt. No one can read his Epistles with any degree of attention without seeing that Paul was a Jew who was greatly influenced by the mystical sects that had come in like a flood from the east and spread all over the Greco-Roman world in the first century of our era and before, and had profoundly modified the philosophy that had come from Greece. This amalgam, made up of Hellenism, Judaism, and Oriental mysticism, has received the name of Gnosticism. It was a very wide-spread tendency in the centuries preceding the beginning of our era, and assumed many different forms, so much so that it is difficult sometimes to see the common resemblance. Paul's language which was not derived from the synoptic tradition bears a close resemblance to the terms used in these various Gnostic sects scattered all over the East. Their teachings were termed "mysteries," and Paul speaks of "the mystery which was hid from ages and generations being now made manifest to the saints," of "the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden mystery which God ordained before the world unto our glory." Instead of the letters of Paul being moulded upon the Gospel story, containing quotation and reference to miracle and parable and precept, they are saturated with the language of Gnos

ticism, and repeat on almost every page the terms in common use in the mystery sects of his time. Especially is there a close resemblance between Paul's language and that of the literature of Hermes the Thrice Greatest, which is the key to the wisdom of Egypt, and which takes us back to the best in the mystery traditions of antiquity. The theme of all the treatises of that body of literature is the man-doctrine, the man-mystery, or man-myth. Briefly put it is the story of the descent of man from his heavenly home, and then his return to that state of glory after having mastered the powers of evil. There is nothing so ancient as this man-doctrine; it is lost in the mists of antiquity, and in the centuries immediately preceding our era it was a well developed doctrine in the whole GrecoRoman world. It was the jealously guarded secret of every mystery institution of the ancient world. It is a great hindrance to the understanding of the New Testament, especially the Epistles of Paul, that this man-doctrine of the ancient mystery institutions of antiquity as it is taught in the Sermons of the Thrice Greatest Hermes, is so little known. Perhaps this is not to be wondered at when we remember how recent is the discovery of the writings, and what a prejudice has been raised against them on account of their resemblance to the New Testament, as though they were worthless imitations of it. Professor Flinders Petrie in his Personal Religion in Egypt Before Christianity rightly says that as the treatises of Thrice Greatest Hermes are clearly earlier than the apostolic age, they are among the most needful for the understanding of the modes of thought of that time. The apostle Paul cannot be understood without an acquaintance with the sermons of Thrice Greatest Hermes. Here are found the terms which the apostle is constantly using. Paul has been a writer difficult to understand because he does not define his terms. But why should he define them when

he was using the terms of his predecessors and contemporaries well known to those to whom he wrote? In his Epistles we have echoes of what was taught in Egypt and Greece two or three hundred years before, which has come down to us in this body of literature. The apostle and the author of these treatises, are evidently, as Charlotte E. Woods rightly says in The Gospel of Righteousness, treating of the same deep mysteries and are anxious to make known the same spiritual truths.

When two writers use the same terms it is evident that they are dealing with the same theme. And the theme of both is the spiritual story of man-the eternal process or progress of man toward divinity. This is redemption; and redemption, no one needs to be told, is the theme of Paul. The goal of this process or progress is Christhood. In the literature of Hermes is set forth with Oriental imagery and symbol which often obscure by their abundance and splendor, the story of man which in the New Testament is the story of the Christ. It was the claim of the second century Gnostics that Christianity was none. other than the consummation of the inner doctrine of the mystery institutions of all the nations. The end of them all was the revelation of the mystery of man which was hid, as Paul says, from ages and generations. And it is the same story that is taught in the Gospel records by means of a symbolic life. In the history and person of Christ we are to see a living prophetic picture of the final development of man. In Christ every man, therefore, possesses both the guarantee and the representation of his own destined perfection. In the Gospel story we are to see the birth of this inner man or Christ, his growth, his conflict with the lower nature, his gradual mastery of all lower forces, and his final triumph and glorification.

There was not, therefore, such a sudden break as has been supposed between paganism and Christianity; the lat

ter did not come upon the world suddenly and miraculously like the rise of the sun at midnight; the two blended into each other with almost insensible gradations. There was, in this sense, a Christianity before Jesus, and all the characteristic ideas and terms such as we find in the pages of Paul and John,-Logos, Saviour, only-begotten, second birth, resurrection, mystery, etc., were in use in the preChristian Hermetic literature of Egypt. Plato taught that there were original patterns or models of all natural objects, existing in the divine mind prior to their creation. Especially was there an archetypal man. In one of the Hermetic books we have this text: "All-Father Mind, being life and light, did bring forth man co-equal to himself" (Corpus Hermeticum, I, li). This is essentially Platonic, for this "man" is not any actual man, but the archetypal or prototypal man, "the spiritual prototype of humanity and of every individual man." This archetypal man is very real though unhistorical. The idea or plan or model of an organ, a house, a steam-engine, is prior to its existence as a material fact, and is the real cause of its existence as a material fact. As there is an ideal leaf according to which the actual leaf is formed, so there is an ideal or archetypal man according to which every man is formed. Physical science emphasizes this fact in its doctrine of conformity to type. It is the ideal of the animal or plant that determines the direction of the particles that make and build up the animal or plant. The potential or archetypal oak within the acorn causes the entire growth of the tree. This enables us to understand the immanence of Christ as Paul conceived of it. Philo wrote with no knowledge of Christianity, "The first Son of God is the divine image or model of all else, the original species, the archetypal idea, the first measure of the universe, the heavenly man." The Kabbala teaches that the first account of the creation in Genesis refers, not to the creation of the actual world, but