of some kind of ceremony immediately after, or, at the most, at no great interval after birth. Christian baptism was not originally intended to be administered to unconscious infants, but to persons in full possession of their faculties, and responsible for their actions. Moreover, it was performed, as is well known, not by merely sprinkling the forehead, but by causing the candidate to descend naked into the water, the priest joining him there, and pouring the water over his head. The catechumen could not receive baptism until after he understood something of the nature of the faith he was embracing, and was prepared to assume its obligations. A rite more totally unfitted for administration to infants could hardly have been found. Yet such was the need that was felt for a solemn recognition by religion of the entrance of the child into the world, that this rite, in course of time, completely lost its original nature. Infancy took the place of maturity; sprinkling of immersion. But while the age and manner of baptism were altered, the ritual remained under the influence of the primitive idea with which it had been instituted. The obligations could no longer be undertaken by the persons baptized; hence they must be undertaken for them. Thus was the Christian Church landed in the absurdity—unparalleled, I believe, in any other natal ceremony—of requiring the most solemn promises to be made, not by those who were thereafter to fulfil them, but by others in their name; these others having no power to enforce their fulfillment, and neither those actually assuming the engagement, nor those on whose behalf it was assumed, being morally responsible in case it should be broken. Yet this strange incongruity was forced upon the Church by an imperious want of human nature itself; and the insignificant sects who have adopted the baptism of adults have failed, in their zeal for historical consistency, to recognize a sentiment whose roots lie far deeper than the chronological foundation of Christian rites, and stretch far wider than the geographical boundaries of the Christian faith.
The intention of all these forms of baptism—that of Ashantee perhaps excepted—is identical. Water, as the natural means of physical cleansing, is the universal symbol of spiritual purification. Hence immersion, or washing, or sprinkling, implies the deliverance of the infant from the stain of original sin.
