recognizing the spiritual nature of the sacrament, held views about the importance of the rite which were as strong as those of any Greek theologian who had mingled confusedly in his mind Christian doctrines and the maxims of Pagan philosophy about the creative power of the element of water. Of course such a doctrine of the im portance of the baptism with water had to be modified to some extent. There were cases of Christian martyrs who had never been baptized, and yet had confessed Christ and died to confess Him : for their sakes the idea of a baptism of blood was brought forward ; they were baptized not with water, but in their own blood. And the same desire to widen the circle of the baptized led the way to the recog nition of the baptism of heretics, laymen, and nurses. It was the Augustinian doctrine of baptism which was developed by the Schoolmen, and which now is the substance of modern Roman Catholic teaching. The Schoolmen, whose whole theology was dominated by the Augustinian conception of the Church, simply took over and made somewhat more mechanical and less spiritual Augustine s doctrine. They were enabled to give the doctrine a more precise and definite shape by accommodat ing it to the terms of the Aristotelian philosophy. They began by distinguishing between the matter and the form of baptism. Had Augustine had this distinction before him he would probably have called the water the matter, and the action of the Holy Spirit the form which verified and gave shape to the matter ; but the whole idea of the Schoolmen was much more mechanical, the magical idea of the sacra ment came much more into prominence, and the spiritual and ethical fell much more into the background, and with them, while water was the materia sacramenti, the forma sacramenti was the words of the rite, " I baptize thee," &c., (fee. Thus insensibly the distinction between the external rite and the work of the Holy Spirit, which Augustine had clearly before him in theory at least, was driven back into its original obscurity, and while it was always held theoretically that the grace conferred in baptism was conferred by the Holy Spirit, still the action of the Spirit was so inseparably connected with the mechanical performance of the rite, that the external ceremony was held to be full warrant for the inward spiritual presence and power, and it was held that in baptism grace was conferred ex opere operetta. The actual benefits which were supposed to come in this way were, freedom from original sin and forgiveness of it and all actual sins committed up to the time of baptism, and the implanting of the new spiritual life a life which could only be slain by a deadly sin. The Scholastic doctrine of baptism is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and the restatements made by Mohler on the one hand, and Jesuit theologians on the other, do not do more than give a poetical colouring to the doctrine, or bring out more thoroughly the magical and
mechanical nature of the rite.or Roman Catholic, is to be traced back to Augustine and his distinction between the sign and the thing signified, and may be looked at as a legitimate development of the Augustinian doctrine, just as that must be considered to be an advance on the doctrine of the early Church Fathers. The early Fathers had confused the sign with the thing signified, the water with the action of the Holy Spirit, and could only mark their half -conscious recognition of the distinction by an alternating series of strong statements made now on the one side and now on the other. Augustine distinguished the two with great clearness, but connected them in an external way by means of his conception of the visible Church and of baptism as the door leading into it, and this led his followers to pay exclusive attention to the external side, until the thing signified became lost in the sign. The Protestant theologians con nected the two in an internal way by means of the spiritual conception of faith, and so were able always to keep the sign in due subordination to the thing signified. It is faith not faith in the sense of imperfect knowledge, or assent to intellectual propositions, but faith in the sense of personal trust in a personal Saviour, or " fiducia," as the 17th century theologians called it which so connects the water with the presence and power of the Spirit that the one is the means which the other uses to impart His spiritual grace. In this way baptism is looked upon as one of the means of grace, and grace is imparted through it as through the other means the Lord s Supper, the Word of God, prayer, &c. Just as the dead letters and sounds of the Word of God are but the signs of the presence and power of His Spirit, and become at His touch the living revelation of the Lord, so in baptism, the outward rite, worthless in itself, becomes the sign and pledge of the presence and power of the Spirit of God ; and as, in the case of the Word of God, it is faith or " fiducia " that on the human side connects the external signs with the inward power of the Spirit, so, in baptism, it is the same faith which unites the waiter and the Spirit. So far all orthodox Protestants are agreed, but in order to show the historical evolution of the doctrine, it is necessary to notice in a sentence the difference between the Lutheran and the Calvinist doctrines. Luther s own doctrine of baptism changed very much : in the second stage the stage represented by the tract, De Babyl. Capt. Ecd. it is not different, in germ at least, from the Calvinist view ; but he afterwards drew back and adopted views much nearer to the Scholastic theory. He was evidently afraid that, if he went too far from the Scholastic doctrine, and insisted too strongly on the importance of faith, he migh t be led on to reject the baptism of infants ; and his later theories are a recoil from that. The question which Luther had to face and answer here was, What is meant by faith, the faith which connects the symbol with the reality, and so appropriates the gifts of God s grace in the sacrament 1 Is it a faith which begins and ends in the individual act of faith at work in the person that is baptized ? or is it a much wider thing with a more universal sig nificance? Luther did not face this question thoroughly, but his recoil from the Reformed theory of baptism seems to show that he would have taken the former answer. Nor did Calvin face the question ; but his doctrine of baptism implies that he would have taken the latter answer. The faith which a man has in Christ, the faith which appropriates, is not the individual s only, but extends far beyond him and his small circle. It is awakened by the Holy Spirit, it comes into being within the sphere of God s saving purpose. Its very existence indicates a solidarite between the individual believer and the whole Church of God. Hence on the Reformed doctrine, while faith is essential to the right appropriation of the blessing in the rite, there is no need for thoroughly developed faith in those who are baptized. If they are infants, then they are baptized because of the faith of their parents or near relations, or of the congregation before whom the baptism is performed; only those who are the sponsors for the child bind them selves before God to train up the child to know that it has been baptized, and to appropriate in conscious individual faith the benefits of the ordinance. Such is the Reformed theory of baptism; and it rests upon the ideas of the solidarite of believers, of the prior existence of the Church to the individual believers, and of the ethical unity of the Church. On the other hand, those who hold that the Church is simply the sum of individual men and women, and that it is increased not by the silent widening of the influence of God s saving purpose within mankind, but by individual conversions and by individuals joining the
