(d) Salvation consists of moral regeneration.  The efficacy of initiation without moral reformation naturally appeared doubtful to serious thinkers.  Diogenes is reported to have asked, “What say you?  Will Pataecion the thief be happier in the next world than Epaminondas, because he has been initiated?” And Philo says, “It often happens that good men are not initiated, but that robbers, and murderers, and lewd women are, if they pay money to the initiators and hierophants.”  Ovid protests against the immoral doctrine of mechanical purgation with more than his usual earnestness (Fasti, ii. 35):—­

  “Omne nefas omnemque mali purgamina causam
     Credebant nostri tollere posse senes. 
   Graecia principium moris fuit; ilia nocentes
     Impia lustratos ponere facta putat. 
   A! nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis
     Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua!”

Such passages show that abuses existed, but also that it was felt to be a scandal if the initiated person failed to exhibit any moral improvement.

These different conceptions of the office of the Mysteries cannot, as I have said, be separated historically.  They all reappear in the history of the Christian sacraments.  The main features of the Mystery-system which passed into Catholicism are the notions of secrecy, of symbolism, of mystical brotherhood, of sacramental grace, and, above all, of the three stages in the spiritual life, ascetic purification, illumination, and [Greek:  epopteia] as the crown.

The secrecy observed about creeds and liturgical forms had not much to do with the development of Mysticism, except by associating sacredness with obscurity (cf.  Strabo, x. 467, [Greek:  he krypsis he mystike semnopoiei to theion, mimoumene ten physin autou ekpheugousan ten aisthesin]), a tendency which also showed itself in the love of symbolism.  This certainly had a great influence, both in the form of allegorism (cf.  Clem. Strom, i. 1. 15, [Greek:  esti de ha kai ainixetai moi he graphe; peirasetai de kai ganthanousa eipein kai epikryptomene ekphenai kai deixai sioposa]), which Philo calls “the method of the Greek Mysteries,” and in the various kinds of Nature-Mysticism.  The great value of the Mysteries lay in the facilities which they offered for free symbolical interpretation.

The idea of mystical union by means of a common meal was, as we have seen, familiar to the Greeks.  For instance, Plutarch says (Non fosse suav. vivi sec.  Epic. 21), “It is not the wine or the cookery that delights us at these feasts, but good hope, and the belief that God is present with us, and that He accepts our service graciously.”  There have always been two ideas of sacrifice, alike in savage and civilised cults—­the mystical, in which it is a communion, the victim who is slain and eaten being himself the god, or a symbol of the god; and the commercial, in which something valuable is offered to the god in the hope of receiving some benefit in exchange.  The Mysteries certainly encouraged the idea of communion, and made it easier for the Christian rite to gather up into itself all the religious elements which can be contained in a sacrament of this kind.