joyous; men were crushed by tyranny, defiled by unnatural lusts, internally conscious of their pollution. Hope had died out of their lives. Even all nature seemed to reflect their own wretchednesss and their own decay. Thus Cyprian appeals, in his "Address to Demetrianus," to a common belief, which being founded on what was considered a notorious and universal experience, needed no proof from the Sacred Scriptures. "The world," he says, "has now grown old....... In the winter there is not such an abundance of showers for nourishing the seeds; in the summer the sun has not so much heat for cherishing the harvest; nor in the spring season are the corn fields so joyous; nor are the autumnal seasons so fruitful in their leafy products. The layers of marble are dug out in less quantity from the disemboweled and wearied mountains

; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor at sea, the soldier in the camp, innocence in the markets, justice in the tribunal, concord in friendships, skilfulness in the arts, discipline in morals........ We see grey hairs in boys-the hair fails before it begins to grow, and life........ begins with old age.... ..whatever is now born degenerates with the old age of the world itself." Hence, in this dreary misery, pagan religion took the form of frenzied orgies, or initiation into terrific and unutterable mysteries; while to the eye of the Christian, the whole world and even the bodies of men, and women, and children, were swarming with devils. Thus Cyprian says in his treatise "On the Vanity of Idols." "Impure and wandering spirits are lurking under the statues and consecrated images; these inspire the breasts of their prophets with their afflatus, animate the fibres of the entrails, direct the flights of birds, rule the lots, give efficiency to oracles, are always mixing up falsehood with truth, for they are both deceived and they deceive; they disturb the life (of those deceived by them), they disquiet their slumbers; these spirits also creeping into their bodies secretly, terrify their minds, distort their limbs, break their health, excite

.....

diseases to force them to the worship of themselves, so that when glutted with the steam of the altars and the piles of cattle, they may unloose what they themselves had bound, and so appear to have effected a cure.. These, however, when adjured by us through the true God, at once yield and confess, and are constrained to go out from the bodies possessed. You may see them at our voice, and by the operation of the hidden majesty, smitten with stripes, burnt with fire, racked with the increase of a growing punishment, howling, groaning, entreating, confessing whence they came, and when they depart, even in the hearing of those very persons who worship them, and either springing forth at once or vanishing gradually, even as the faith of the sufferer comes in aid or the grace of the healer effects."

While, then, to men of keen intellect, the pagan religion was sheer stupidity, to men of fearful conscience, it became a ghastly deviltry. And on all sides it was the fruitful parent of that revolting immorality which renders a full description of heathen society utterly impossible. And here, as everywhere and always, "the dark places of the earth were full of the habitations of cruelty." When we read of the holy martyrs cast to the wild beasts, we think chiefly of the sufferings of the victims; very far more awful was the degradation of the spectators. We regard with very righteous disgust, those public entertainments which involve to the performers, extreme danger of life or limb, even when the danger is freely and gladly incurred. We have a society and laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals. But the fights of gladiators and the destruction of human beings by wild beasts, was the amusement of polite society and of the populace in the heathen Roman Empire. We need not wonder that in this intoxication of brutality, the tender affections of home and neighborhood werə almost annihilated. In the pestilence which desolated Carthage, the heathen, through fear of infection, abandoned their own nearest kindred, and left the bodies of their dead

unburied in the streets. It was the Christians who tended the heathen sick, and who buried the heathen dead. In the earthliness and animalism of paganism, there was no quickening spirit, no hope of immortality. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

To this stupidity, deviltry, lust, cruelty, despair, came the good news of the grace of God. "Therefore," said St. Paul, "we both labor and suffer reproach, because we have believed in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of them that believe." The Christian preachers told the world of a free and immediate forgiveness. They promised, in God's name, a Holy Spirit, who should purify and strengthen and comfort the spirits of men, and give them a real righteousness; delivering them out of darkness and bringing them into the marvellous light of truth and holiness. They preached love, not by words but by deeds. They proclaimed Christ and the resurrection and eternal life; and they called men into a sacred brotherhood, founded upon sacrifice, where law itself was liberty and where liberty was love.

This, then, was the contrast; here was the old man and the new, Christ and Antichrist, the devil and God, the festering corrupt world and the divine family, the Church coming down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband. And the passage from one state to the other was Baptism. St. Cyprian believed that there was no other; and for my own part, I entirely believe that he was right. Christianity was not a doctrine to be learned in a school, and enjoyed as a luxury of the choice spirits of the age. It was a life, a battle, a brotherhood, a kingdom of heaven. Emphatically at the beginning of the great conflict were the words of our Saviour true, "he that is not with me is against me." A secret Christianity, a birth of the spirit that was afraid or ashamed of the baptism of water, a safely obscure piety, "passing on the other side," while St. Felicitas and St. Perpetua were torn to pieces by wild beasts for the love of Jesus-this was too infamously con

temptible. "Whosoever," says the Master, "shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father who is in heaven; and whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father who is in heaven." "He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

And while holy baptism was regarded as the only way to the new and divine life-the adoption into the family of God-it was regarded as a real and genuine way. Therein the old man was verily dead and buried with Christ. The newly baptized received the full and free forgiveness of his sins. The Holy Ghost was given to him, as his ever present monitor and guide. He was welcomed into a genuine brotherhood. He became in very fact, "a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven." Nor was the grace of baptism any the less real because it was the expression of the eternal love of God; or because like all other gifts of God it was changed into a curse by hypocrisy or lost by sin.

And in the time of Cyprian, the manner of baptism corresponded, far more nearly than now, with its supreme importance. It was administered almost always by the Bishop, to candidates, who, if adults, had been long and carefully prepared. Or, if administered by some other, it was followed immediately by Episcopal confirmation. It was rendered more impressive by immersion three times, by symbolic anointing with consecrated oil, by signing with the sign of the cross, by the laying on of hands, by the administration of the Eucharist. It was a crisis in a man's life, and an event never to be forgotten. Then he "put on Christ;" then his desires, his prayers, his good resolutions, his spiritual earnestness, because a real and complete discipleship.

Here I may remark, for even this has been denied, that the practice of infant baptism was so universal, and its lawfulness and benefits so undisputed in the Church and Province over which St. Cyprian presided, that it seems impos

sible to doubt that both the practice and the doctrine rested upon a genuine Apostolic tradition, to say nothing of the record of the New Testament itself. Apart from any direct Apostolic authority, the baptism of infants would have been a most true development; for the relation of children to the divine family and to the Kingdom of Heaven, must have clamoured for a settlement from the very foundation of the Church. But neither the temper of the first half of the third century in general, nor of the African Church and its illustrious doctors in particular, would have been satisfied with a merely theoretical justification of any practice which might have seemed like an innovation in a mystery so sacred as the Sacrament of Regeneration. St. Cyprian, like Tertullian before him, demanded not argument but prescription.

On this matter of infant baptism, however, we have not only the judgment of St. Cyprian himself, which alone would be conclusive as to the usage of his Church, but he writes on this subject to Fidus, in the name also of his Episcopal colleagues, sixty-six in number, assembled in Council. "In respect of the case of infants," he says, "which you say ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after their birth, and that the law of ancient circumcision should be regarded, so that you think that one who is just born should not be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day, we all thought very differently in our Council. For in this course which you thought was to be taken, no one agreed; but we all rather judge that the mercy and grace of God is not to be refused to any one born of man. For as the Lord says in His gospel: The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them,' as far as we can, we must strive that, if possible, no soul be lost... With respect to what you say, that the aspect of an infant in the first days after its birth is not pure, so that any one of us would still shudder at kissing it, we do not think that this ought to be alleged as any impediment to heavenly grace. For it is written, 'to the