Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he
appears to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual
blood is, I should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is
any reason for supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded
baptism by blood very differently from the way in which the Christian
Church has generally regarded baptism by water--namely, as a SYMBOL of
some inner regeneration. There may certainly have been a little more
of the MAGICAL view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older
religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of
degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot
but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone
inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of
the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards
to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs
aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of
texts and epitaphs of the same character as that above-quoted, and they
are well worth studying by those interested in the subject. Cumont, it
may be noted (vol. i, p. 305), thinks that the story of Mithra and the
slaying of the Bull must have originated among some pastoral people to
whom the bull was the source of all life. The Bull in heaven--the symbol
of the triumphant Sungod--and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good
of humanity were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF
OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first won this
conception of divinity for mankind--though of course it is in essence
quite similar to the conception put forward by the Christian Church.

As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was accompanied by
a real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer quotes an ancient writer
(1) who says that for some time after the ceremony the fiction of a new
birth was kept up by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born
babe. And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in the
present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight
weeks is by many doctors recommended as the only means of getting rid
of deep-seated illnesses and enabling a patient's organism to make a
completely new start in life.

(1) Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
p. 229.

"At Rome," he further says (p. 230), "the new birth