A Source Book for Ancient Church History - Mirrors

258 A Source Book for Ancient Church History(b) Tertullian, De Baptismo, 5-8. (MSL, 1:1314.)The whole passage should be read as showing clearly thatTertullian recognized the similarity between Christian baptismand heathen purifying washings, but referred the effects ofthe heathen rites to evil powers, quite in harmony with theChristian admission of the reality of heathen divinities as evilpowers and heathen exorcisms as wrought by the aid of evilspirits.[234]Ch. 5. … Thus man will be restored by God to His likeness,for he formerly had been after the image of God; the image iscounted being in His form [in effigie], the likeness in His eternity[in æternitate]. For he receives that Spirit of God which he hadthen received from His afflatus, but afterward lost through sin.Ch. 6. Not that in the waters we obtain the Holy Spirit, butin the water, under (the witness of angels) we are cleansed andprepared for the Holy Spirit.…Ch. 7. After this, when we have issued from the font, weare thoroughly anointed with a blessed unction according to theancient discipline, wherein on entering the priesthood men wereaccustomed to be anointed with oil from a horn, wherefore Aaronwas anointed by Moses.… Thus, too, in our case the unctionruns carnally, but profits spiritually; in the same way as the actof baptism itself is carnal, in that we are plunged in the water,but the effect spiritual, in that we are freed from sins.Ch. 8. In the next place, the hand is laid upon us, invokingand inviting the Holy Spirit through benediction.… But this, aswell as the former, is derived from the old sacramental rite inwhich Jacob blessed his grandsons born of Joseph, Ephraim,and Manasses; with his hands laid on them and interchanged,and indeed so transversely slanted the one over the other that, bydelineating Christ, they even portended the future benediction inChrist. [Cf. Gen. 48:13 f.]