THE RELIGIOUS AXIOM • 101 we confine our attention for the most part to the development of the priest and the sacrament. For it was here, perhaps more than in episcopacy, in its earlier stages, that the religious axiom was obscured or ignored. The simplicity of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the two ordinances instituted by Jesus Christ, was only gradually corrupted into the elaborate sacramentalism of the later Roman Catholicism. The facts are substantially as follows: Paganism had certain rites