In the service of Edward the Sixth of England, water is directed to be mixed with the wine.[309:1] This is a union of the two; not a half measure, but a double one. If it be correct to take it with wine, then they were right; if with water, they still were right; as they took both, they could not be wrong.
The bread, used in these Pagan Mysteries, was carried in baskets, which practice was also adopted by the Christians. St. Jerome, speaking of it, says:
"Nothing can be richer than one who carries the body of Christ (viz.: the bread) in a basket made of twigs."[309:2]
The Persian Magi introduced the worship of Mithra into Rome, and his mysteries were solemnized in a cave. In the process of initiation there, candidates were also administered the sacrament of bread and wine, and were marked on the forehead with the sign of the cross.[309:3]
The ancient Greeks also had their "Mysteries," wherein they celebrated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The Rev. Robert Taylor, speaking of this, says:
"The Eleusinian Mysteries, or, Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, was the most august of all the Pagan ceremonies celebrated, more especially by the Athenians, every fifth year,[309:4] in honor of Ceres, the goddess of corn, who, in allegorical language, had given us her flesh to eat; as Bacchus, the god of wine, in like sense, had given us his blood to drink. . . .
"From these ceremonies is derived the very name attached to our Christian sacrament of the Lord's Supper,—'those holy Mysteries;'—and not one or two, but absolutely all and every one of the observances used in our Christian solemnity. Very many of our forms of expression in that solemnity are precisely the same as those that appertained to the Pagan rite."[309:5]
Prodicus (a Greek sophist of the 5th century B. C.) says that, the ancients worshiped bread as Demeter (Ceres) and wine as Dionysos (Bacchus);[309:6] therefore, when they ate the bread, and drank the wine, after it had been consecrated, they were doing as the Romanists claim to do at the present day, i. e., eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their god.[309:7]
Mosheim, the celebrated ecclesiastical historian, acknowledges that: