In my last talk I drew attention to some of the striking similarities between—on the one hand—the traditional Christian rites of Holy Week, and several incidents in the Gospel narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, and—on the other hand—the so-called pattern of the Dying and Rising God which emerged largely as the result of Frazer’s researches in The Golden Bough. Fifty years or so ago, it seems to have been widely supposed that these discoveries of similarity between Christian and pagan mysteries, collected by scholars like Robertson Smith and Frazer, popularised in tendentious paper-backs by writers like Grant Allen, somehow made nonsense of Christianity. And it must be admitted that they did make nonsense of a great many nineteenth-century ideas about Christianity; at least they made it impossible to regard it just as some sort of transcendental ethic, dropped ready-made from the sky, without roots in the earth, in history, without relevance to the basic and perennial needs of human society and the human psyche, or to the forms and forces that shape them. But I remember when, as a boy, I read one of those books published by the Rationalist Press, it had just the opposite effect on me to that intended. The Christian Scriptures and the Catholic rites to which I was accustomed, without losing their wonted sense, gained a quality and a sense of which my pastors and catechisms had told me nothing: a sense of solidarity with creation, with the processes of nature, with the cycles of the seasons. Dramatisations of the processes of vegetation they might be, but had not Christ himself drawn the analogy between the Christian self-sacrifice and the grain of wheat which must die if it is to bear fruit?