so-called Apostles' Creed in the West, and the so-called Nicene Creed in the East. They then advanced into the inner chamber. Before them yawned the deep pool or reservoir, and standing by the deacon, or deaconess, as the case might be, to arrange that all should be done with decency. The whole troop undressed completely as if for a bath, and stood up," naked, before the Bishop, who put to each the questions, to which the answer was returned in a loud and distinct voice, as of those who knew what they had undertaken. They then plunged into the water. Both before and after the immersion their bare limbs were rubbed with oil from head to foot; 7 they were then clothed in white gowns, and received, as token of the kindly feeling of their new brotherhood, the kiss of peace, and a taste of honey and milk; and they expressed their new faith by using for the first time the Lord's Prayer.

These are the outer forms of which, in the Western Churches, almost every particular is altered even in the most material points. Immersion has become the exception and not the rule. Adult baptism, as well as immersion, exists only among the Baptists. The dramatic action of the scene is lost. The anointing, like the bath, is reduced to a few drops of oil in the Roman Church, and in the Protestant churches has entirely disappeared. What once could only be administered by Bishops is now administered by every clergyman, and throughout the Roman Church by laymen and even by women. We propose then to ask what is the residue of the meaning of Baptism which has survived, and what we may learn from it, and from the changes through which it has passed.

I. The ordinance of Baptism was founded on the Jewishwe may say the Oriental-custom, which, both in ancient and modern times, regards ablution, cleansing of the hands, the face, and the person, at once as a means of health and as a

• Bingham, xi. ii. § 1, 2.

Ibid. xi. 9, § 3, 45; xii. 1, 4. Possibly after immersion the undressing and the anointing were partial.

sign of purity. We shall presently see that here as elsewhere the Founder of Christianity chose rather to sanctify and elevate what already existed than to create and invent a new form for Himself. Baptism is the oldest ceremonial ordinance that Christianity possesses; it is the only one which is inherited from Judaism. It is thus interesting as the only ordinance of the Christian Church which equally belonged to the merciful Jesus and the austere John. Out of all the manifold religious practices of the ancient lawsacrifices, offerings, temple, tabernacle, scapegoat, sacred vestments, sacred trumpets-He chose this one alone; the most homely, the most universal, the most innocent of all. He might have chosen the peculiar Nazarite custom of the long tresses and the rigid abstinence by which Samson and Samuel and John had been dedicated to the service of the Lord. He did nothing of the sort. He might have continued the strange and painful rite of circumcision. He, or at least His Apostles, rejected it altogether. might have chosen some elaborate ceremonial like the initiation into the old Egyptian and Grecian mysteries. He chose instead what every one could understand. He took what, at least in Eastern and Southern countries, was the most delightful, the most ordinary, the most salutary, of social observances.

cleansing

He

1. By choosing water and the use of the bath, He indicated one chief characteristic of the Christian religion. Baptism as a Whatever else the Christian was to be, Baptism – the use of water-showed that he was to be clean and pure, in body, soul, and spirit; clean even in body. Cleanliness is a duty which some of the monastic communities of Christendom have despised, and some have even

rite.

• This is the meaning of the frequent reference to 'water' in St. John's writings. As in John vi. 54, the phrases 'eating' and 'drinking,' 'flesh and blood,' refer to the spiritual nourishment of which the Eucharist, never mentioned in the Fourth Gospel, was the outward expression, so in John iii. 5, the word 'water' refers to the moral purity symbolised by Baptism, which in like manner (as a universal institution) is never mentioned in that Gospel.

treated as a crime. But such was not the mind of Him who chose the washing with water for the prime ordinance of His followers. Wash and be clean' was the prophet's admonition of old to the Syrian whom he sent to bathe in the river Jordan. It was the text of the one only sermon by which a wellknown geologist of this country was known to his generation. 'Cleanliness next to godliness' was the maxim of the great religious prophet of England in the last century, John Wesley. With the Essenes, amongst whom Baptism originated, we may almost say that it was godliness." If the early Christians had, as we shall see, their daily Communion, the Essenes, for the sake of maintaining their punctilious cleanliness, had even more than daily Baptism. Every time that we see the drops of water poured over the face in Baptism, they are signs to us of the cleanly habits which our Master prized when He founded the rite of Baptism, and when, by His own Baptism in the sweet soft stream of the rapid Jordan, He blessed the element of water for use as the best and choicest of God's natural gifts to man in his thirsty, weary, wayworn passage through the dust and heat of the world. But the cleanness of the body, in the adoption of Baptism by Christ and His forerunner, was meant to indicate the perfect cleanness, the unsullied purity, of the soul; or, as the English Baptismal Service quaintly expresses it, the mystical washing away of sin—that is, the washing, cleansing process that effaces the dark spots of selfishness and passion in the human character, in which, by nature and by habit, they had been so deeply ingrained. It was a homely maxim of Keble, 'Associate the idea of sin with the idea of dirt.' It indicates also that as the Christian heart must be bathed in an atmosphere of purity, so the Christian mind must be bathed in an atmosphere of truth, of love of truth, of perfect truthfulness, of transparent veracity and sincerity. What filthy, indecent talk or action is to the heart and affections, that a lie however white, a fraud however pious, is to the mind and conscience. Sir Lectures on the Jewish Church, iii. 397.

Isaac Newton is said by his friends to have had the whitest soul that they ever knew. That is the likeness of a truly Christian soul as indicated by the old baptismal washing: the whiteness of purity, the clearness and transparency of truth. There was one form of this idea which continued far down into the Middle Ages, long after it had been dissociated from Baptism, but which may be given as an illustration of the same idea represented by the same form. The order of knighthood in England of which the banners hang in King Henry the Seventh's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and which is distinguished from all the other orders as the 'most honourable,' is called the Order of the Bath. This name was given because in the early days of chivalry the knights, who were enlisted in defence of right against wrong, truth against falsehood, honour against dishonour, on the evening before they were admitted to the Order, were laid in a bath1 and thoroughly washed, in order to show how bright and pure ought to be the lives of those who engage in noble enterprises. Sir Galahad, amongst King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, is the type at once of a true ancient Knight of the Bath and of a true Apostolic Christian.

My good blade carves the helms of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure;

My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.

2. This leads us to the second characteristic of the act of
Baptism' was not only a bath, but a plunge-

Baptism.

Baptism as a plunge.

an entire submersion in the deep water, a leap as into the rolling sea or the rushing river, where for the moment the waves close over the bather's head, and he emerges again as from a momentary grave; or it was the shock of a shower-bath-the rush of water passed over the whole person from capacious vessels, so as to wrap the recipient as within the veil of a splashing cataract. This was the part 'To 'dub' a knight is said to be taken from the dip,' 'doob' in the bath. Evelyn saw the Knights in their baths (Diary, April 19, 1661). 2 See Dr. Smith's History of Christian Antiquities, vol. i. p. 169.

of the ceremony on which the Apostles laid so much stress. It seemed to them like a burial of the old former self and the rising up again of the new self. So St. Paul compared it to the Israelites passing through the roaring waves of the Red Sea, and St. Peter to the passing through the deep waters of the flood. We are buried,' said St. Paul, with Christ by baptism at His death; that, like as Christ was raised, thus we also should walk in the newness of life.' 93 Baptism, as the entrance into the Christian society, was a complete change from the old superstitions or restrictions of Judaism. to the freedom and confidence of the gospel; from the idolatries and profligacies of the old heathen world to the light and purity of Christianity. It was a change effected only by the same effort and struggle as that with which a strong swimmer or an adventurous diver throws himself into the stream and struggles with the waves, and comes up with increased energy out of the depths of the dark abyss.

This, too, is a lesson taught by Baptism which still lives, although the essence of the material form is gone. There is now no disappearance as in a watery grave. There is now no conscious and deliberate choice made by the eager convert at the cost of cruel partings from friends, perhaps of a painful death. It is but the few drops sprinkled, a ceremony undertaken long before or long after the adoption of Christianity has occurred. But the thing signified by the ancient form still keeps before us that which Christians were intended to be. This is why it was connected both in name and in substance with Conversion.' In the early Church the careful distinction which later times have made between Baptism, Regeneration, Conversion, and Repentance did not exist. They all meant the same thing. In the Apostolic age they were, as we have seen, absolutely combined with Baptism. There was then no waiting till Easter or Pentecost for the great reservoir when the catechumens met the Bishop -the river, the wayside well were taken the moment the convert was disposed to turn, as we say, the new leaf in his Rom. vi. 4; 1 Cor. x. 2; 1 Pet. iii. 20, 21.