A Greek Word, Signifying Immersion.
SECTION I.
We do not speak of baptism as theologians; we are but poor men of letters, who shall never enter the sanctuary. The Indians plunge, and have from time immemorial plunged, into the Ganges. Mankind, always guided by their senses, easily imagined that what purified the body likewise purified the soul. In the subterranean apartments under the Egyptian temples there were large tubs for the priests and the initiated.
O nimium faciles qui tristia crimina cædis
Fluminea tolli posse putatis aqua!
Old Baudier, when he was eighty, made the following comic translation of these lines:
C'est une drôle de maxime,
Qu'une lessive efface un crime.
One can't but think it somewhat droll,
Pump-water thus should cleanse a soul.
Every sign being of itself indifferent, God vouchsafed to consecrate this custom amongst the Hebrew people. All foreigners that came to settle in Palestine were baptized; they were called domiciliary proselytes.
They were not forced to receive circumcision, but only to embrace the seven precepts of the Noachides, and to sacrifice to no strange god. The proselytes of justice were circumcised and baptized; the female proselytes were also baptized, quite naked, in the presence of three men. The most devout among the Jews went and received baptism from the hands of the prophets most venerated by the people. Hence it was that they flocked to St. John, who baptized in the Jordan.
Jesus Christ Himself, who never baptized any one, deigned to receive baptism from St. John. This custom, which had long been an accessory of the Jewish religion, received new dignity, new value from our Saviour, and became the chief rite, the principal seal of Christianity. However, the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were Jews. 'The Christians of Palestine long continued to circumcise. St. John's Christians never received baptism from Christ.
Several other Christian societies applied a cautery to the baptized, with a red-hot iron, being determined to the performance of this extraordinary operation by the words of St. John the Baptist, related by St. Luke: "I baptize you with water, but He that cometh after me shall baptize you with fire."