The Melchizedek Teachings in the Occident

98:6.1Prior to the com­ing of the mys­tery cults and Chris­tian­ity, per­sonal re­li­gion hardly de­vel­oped as an in­de­pen­dent in­sti­tu­tion in the civ­i­lized lands of North Africa and Eu­rope; it was more of a fam­ily, city-state, po­lit­i­cal, and im­pe­rial af­fair. The Hel­lenic Greeks never evolved a cen­tral­ized wor­ship sys­tem; the rit­ual was lo­cal; they had no priest­hood and no “sa­cred book.” Much as the Ro­mans, their re­li­gious in­sti­tu­tions lacked a pow­er­ful driv­ing agency for the preser­va­tion of higher moral and spir­i­tual val­ues. While it is true that the in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of re­li­gion has usu­ally de­tracted from its spir­i­tual qual­ity, it is also a fact that no re­li­gion has thus far suc­ceeded in sur­viv­ing with­out the aid of in­sti­tu­tional or­ga­ni­za­tion of some de­gree, greater or lesser.

98:6.2Oc­ci­den­tal re­li­gion thus lan­guished un­til the days of the Skep­tics, Cyn­ics, Epi­cure­ans, and Sto­ics, but most im­por­tant of all, un­til the times of the great con­test be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Paul’s new re­li­gion of Chris­tian­ity.

98:6.3Dur­ing the third cen­tury af­ter Christ, Mith­raic and Chris­tian churches were very sim­i­lar both in ap­pear­ance and in the char­ac­ter of their rit­ual. A ma­jor­ity of such places of wor­ship were un­der­ground, and both con­tained al­tars whose back­grounds var­i­ously de­picted the suf­fer­ings of the sav­ior who had brought sal­va­tion to a sin-cursed hu­man race.

98:6.4Al­ways had it been the prac­tice of Mith­raic wor­shipers, on en­ter­ing the tem­ple, to dip their fin­gers in holy wa­ter. And since in some dis­tricts there were those who at one time be­longed to both re­li­gions, they in­tro­duced this cus­tom into the ma­jor­ity of the Chris­tian churches in the vicin­ity of Rome. Both re­li­gions em­ployed bap­tism and par­took of the sacra­ment of bread and wine. The one great dif­fer­ence be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Chris­tian­ity, aside from the char­ac­ters of Mithras and Je­sus, was that the one en­cour­aged mil­i­tarism while the other was ul­tra­pa­cific. Mith­ra­ism’s tol­er­ance for other re­li­gions (ex­cept later Chris­tian­ity) led to its fi­nal un­do­ing. But the de­cid­ing fac­tor in the strug­gle be­tween the two was the ad­mis­sion of women into the full fel­low­ship of the Chris­tian faith.

98:6.5In the end the nom­i­nal Chris­tian faith dom­i­nated the Oc­ci­dent. Greek phi­los­o­phy sup­plied the con­cepts of eth­i­cal value; Mith­ra­ism, the rit­ual of wor­ship ob­ser­vance; and Chris­tian­ity, as such, the tech­nique for the con­ser­va­tion of moral and so­cial val­ues.