The Agapae, with their excesses eliminated, survive in the love-feasts of modern Christians. Webster defines “love-feast” as “a religious festival, held quarterly by the Methodists, in imitation of the Agapae of the early Christians.”
That these mysteries of Bacchus and Ceres were adopted by the early Christians is largely admitted by the great church historian himself. Writing of the second century, Mosheim says: “The profound respect paid to the Greek and Roman mysteries, and the extraordinary sanctity that was attributed to them, was a further circumstance that induced the Christians to give their religion a mystic air, in order to put it upon an equal foot, in point of dignity, with that of the Pagans. For this purpose they gave the name of ‘mysteries’ to the institutions of the gospel, and decorated particularly the holy Sacrament with that solemn title. They used in that sacred institution, as also in that of baptism, several of the terms employed in the heathen mysteries and proceeded so far at length as even to adopt some of the rites and ceremonies of which these renowned mysteries consisted.” (Ecclesiastical History, p. 56.)
England’s highest authority on early Christian history, Dean Milman, says: “Christianity disdained that its God and its Redeemer should be less magnificently honored than the demons (gods) of Paganism. In the service it delighted to breathe, as it were, a sublimer sense into the common appellations of the Pagan worship, whether from the ordinary ceremonial or the more secret mysteries. The church became a temple; the table of the communion an altar; the celebration of the Eucharist, the appalling, or unbloody sacrifice.... The incense, the garlands, the lamps, all were gradually adopted by zealous rivalry, or seized as the lawful spoils of vanquished Paganism and consecrated to the service of Christ.
“The church rivaled the old heathen mysteries in expanding by slow degrees its higher privileges.... Its preparatory ceremonial of abstinence, personal purity, ablution, secrecy, closely resembled that of the Pagan mysteries (perhaps each may have contributed to the other)” (History of Christianity, Vol. III, pp. 312, 313).
Smith’s “Dictionary of Antiquities” says: “The mysteries occupied a place among the ancients analogous to that of the holy sacraments in the Christian church.” The “Encyclopedia Britannica” makes the same statement.
James Anthony Froude, in a letter to Prof. Johnson, of England, says: “I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St. Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.”
Saturn.
One of the oldest and most renowned of the European gods was Saturn, whose name was given by the ancients to one of the planets and to one of the days of the week. He was worshiped by the inhabitants of Italy more than a thousand years before Christ came, and centuries before Rome took her place among the nations of the earth. His temples were located in various parts of Italy, the latest and the principal one being at Rome. His chief festival, and the greatest of all the Roman festivals, was the Saturnalia celebrated at the time of the winter solstice. This festival survives in the Christian festival of Christmas.
The following description of the Saturnalia is from the pen of Ridpath: “The most elaborate of all the celebrations of Rome was that of Saturn, held at the winter solstice, and afterwards extended so as to include the twenty-fifth of December.... The festival was called the Saturnalia. Labor ceased, public business was at an end, the courts were closed, the schools had holiday. Tables, laden with bounties, were spread on every hand, and at these all classes for the nonce sat down together. The master and the slave for the day were equals. It was a time of gift-giving and innocent abandonment. In the public shops every variety of the present, from the simplest to the most costly, could be found. Fathers, mothers, kinspeople, friends, all hurried thither to purchase, according to their fancy, what things soever seemed most tasteful and appropriate as presents” (History of the World, Vol. III, p. 97).