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the ministry of the Church; he is not acting under the protection of the bishop, but rather in opposition to the bishop; he does not act as the deputy of the lawful minister; neither does he baptize because of extreme danger of death. He takes upon himself the office of baptizing, simply and solely because for some reason or other he imagines himself, or is imagined by other people, to have a kind of ministerial power about him.'1

Some of these objections may perhaps be fairly met. The restriction of lay baptism to cases of necessity is a regulation of order, and probably the contempt of this regulation would not affect the validity of the act, although it must add to the responsibility of the officiant. Again, although the dissenter certainly does not baptize as a deputy of the lawful minister, he so far acts for him as that he no doubt means to do what Christ intended to be done, which meets any reasonable doctrine of intention. The want of episcopal authority is made much of by all opponents of dissenters' baptism. But no one has proper authority to administer a sacrament except by ordination. If a lay Churchman, who has never been 'sent' to baptize, nevertheless may baptize, it is but a small step further, judged merely by the authority of commission, to allow that some one else who has equally not been sent may also do the same. For all baptized persons are in some sense members of the Church, and dissenters may be supposed to have inherited from the mother whom they have forsaken such powers of baptizing as belong to the laity of the Church, and to be handing them on with an increased irregularity, but still with a remote kind of validity. But this can only be true on the assumption that lay baptism is valid. Dissenters' baptism certainly rests on a precarious foundation; and it is obvious that a lay communicant is a far safer person to administer the sacrament than a dissenting preacher, who at best is an excommunicate layman.

It is popularly supposed that the defects of lay or dissenting baptism are supplied by confirmation; 2 but this is not accurate. The ancient decrees about the reception of persons baptized by heretics and schismatics do certainly, in many instances, order either the imposition of hands or, in the East, anointing with oil. The latter, no doubt, means confirmation, generally speaking; but the former was a usual ceremony in reconciling penitents, and probably reconcilia

1 Baldwin, p. 26.

2

Scott, Laurence, p. xlviii. from Nathaniel Marshall; Bingham, pp. 72-80; Hook, Church Dict. p. 433.

3 See Morinus, De Pœn. IX. ix. x.; Parochial Missions, edited by mission priests of St. John Evan. pp. 134-141, from Morinus.

tion and not confirmation is the intention of many of the canons. Morinus, however, who goes into the subject at length, was disposed to consider that confirmation was meant in all the cases. But, if this is correct, such confirmation was not used as a remedy for the defects of an irregular baptism, but merely in the same way as any baptized person requires it. Confirmation presupposes valid baptism, and the very fact of ordering it would amount to an express recognition of the irregular baptism. If lay or dissenting baptism is not valid in itself, it certainly is not made valid by confirmation or any other supplementary rite.

The difficulty which many feel in even considering the possibility of doubt as to the validity of irregular baptism is that they think it involves consequences of too serious a kind to be consistent with the security of the Church's constitution. They urge that, if lay baptism is condemned, vast numbers of professing Christians must in fact be unbaptized, while living in the communion of the Church and partaking of her sacraments; that their salvation would thus be imperilled, unconsciously to themselves; that many such have received the ordination of priests, and some the consecration of bishops; that their own ordination would then be invalid, and thus all their ministrations to others would be invalid. also, and so invalid baptisms, confirmations, absolutions, eucharists, and ordinations would be multiplied in the Church, until no one could be certain of the validity of any sacramental rite whatever.1 Laurence, Brett, and Waterland sought to escape from this dilemma by maintaining that an unbaptized person might hold a true commission by ordination, and therefore could validly administer sacraments which he had never received himself. They propounded this theory with hesitation, and it was received with little favour. But there is no need to resort to such a solution of the difficulty. A rejection of dissenters' baptism must be qualified by common sense. If the proper ministration has failed through ignorance, there may be the most implicit belief that God will supply the defect. Even St. Cyprian, the stern advocate for baptismal discipline, allowed this, and so did the strictest of the eighteenth-century controversialists.3 It would be an intolerable doctrine that where irregular baptism has been.

Abbott, De Bapt. ii. Comp. Whitgift, vol. ii. p. 527.

2 Lay Baptism Invalid, pp. 90-103; Brett, Enquiry, p. 111; Waterland, pp. 79, 215-226.

3 Cyprian, Ep. lxxiii. 23; Lay Baptism Invalid, p. 64; Hickes, Letter to the Author, 3rd ed. of Lay Baptism Invalid, p. xxxviii.

administered and received in all good faith, it should be rendered absolutely nugatory by an error of which neither administrator nor recipient were conscious. No uneasiness need be felt about the consequences of those lay and schismatical baptisms which have thus been given, and for which no remedy can be applied; but this does not render it any the less necessary to do whatever can be done to put a baptism beyond the reach of doubt when there is the means and the opportunity for doing so.

Such a means certainly exists in the conditional formula provided in the Prayer-Book. This completely secures that a person shall be validly baptized, without running any risk of the sacrilege of re-baptization. Maskell thought that clergy had no right to fall back on such an easy expedient. No doubt the earlier ages endeavoured to fix the validity or invalidity of particular classes of irregular baptism, and did not leave them open to a conditional remedy. But no conditional form existed in those days. It was suggested by the exigencies of circumstances, and is only first found in the statutes of St. Boniface, Archbishop of Mayence, in the eighth century.2 Such a formula is still unknown in the East. Now that we have it, there is no reason why it should not be used in any case of reasonable doubt. The Scotch Church in 1838 decided that the hypothetical form might be used for anyone who should have scruples as to the validity of his own schismatical baptism.3 Dr. Pusey recommended its adoption in all uncertain cases, and, indeed, assumed that it would be used for those baptized by dissenters. He says:

:

'The practice now adopted by the Scotch Church and in our own with regard to persons baptized by such as are not only in schism, but never received any commission to baptize (a case to which there is no parallel in the early Church), unites the advantages of the Latin and Greek practice of the Latin in that it avoids the risk of real re-baptizing, which the ancients regarded as a profanation of the sacred Names; of the Greek in that it does what in us lies to provide that none of the blessings and grace of baptism be lost through our omission, and is an act of piety towards God, desiring that whatever may have hitherto been lacking be supplied.' 4 The late Bishop Wordsworth was of the same mind, for he wrote to Mr. Baldwin, March 4, 1874:

'The Church has not condemned baptism administered by laymen; but I have no hesitation in saying that if I had been baptized 1 Maskell, Holy Baptism, p. 220. Comp. p. 388.

2 Martene, De Rit. Ant. Ecc.

3 Synod, 1838, can. 17; Pusey, Tertullian, p. 295.
4 Ibid. p. 297.

by a person whose commission to baptize was doubtful, I should desire to be baptized with the hypothetical form by a duly ordained minister.'

The use of the hypothetical form avoids presumptuous dogmatism on a debatable point, which the Church has not yet decided with authority; and it is absolutely free from any danger of the sacrilege of iterating baptism, supposing the previous ceremony was really and completely valid. At the same time, conditional baptism satisfies the obligations of the clergy, who have inherited the charge, 'Go ye, baptizing them,' and who are therefore bound not to acquiesce in the usurpation of their office by those who have received no such commission; it satisfies the needs of the person, who thereby secures the full grace of the sacrament with a certainty which cannot be disputed; and it is perfectly loyal to both letter and spirit of the formularies of the English Church, which, if she abstains from condemning irregular baptism, at least gives it no explicit sanction, and thus puts it upon a very different footing from regular baptism administered by the Church's ordained and lawful ministers,

ART. II.-SCEPTICAL CHRISTIANITY.

1. Christ and Christianity. 2. The Story of the Four. 3. The Picture of Jesus. 4. The Picture of Paul. 5. The Conquering Cross. By the Rev. H. R. HAWEIS, M.A., Incumbent of St. James's, Marylebone. (London, 1886– 1887.)

THESE pretty volumes present the outward appearance of a series of novels. They are bound in the correct shade of red, traversed at the proper angle by a bar in black, and bear their titles in a mixture of Greek characters with English which may be art, but are not letters as ordinary mortals of either race have used them.

They are not novels, however. But the distinction does not lie in their dealing with facts; multitudes of historical romances have been written with less wresting of facts than Mr. Haweis uses. The distinction seems rather to consist in this, that if Mr. Haweis had been composing a novel he would have been required to be far more definite in his presentation

of the story which he laid before his readers, and far more careful to gather up the threads of the narrative. He writes with considerable vivacity, and many a passage of imaginative interest has reconciled us to go on reading when we were almost provoked by his levity and arrogance to throw his book aside. But pretty passages do not, we know, make even a good novel if there be glaring faults of construction, and if we do not find ourselves transported into the scenes which are supposed to be presented to us. Now Mr. Haweis does not possess the intellectual industry to construct any account of any part of Christianity completely. It is no trouble to him to pass by objections and to lay down doubtful or exploded views as the only true and honest statement of the facts. He calls his volumes pictures, as if they were to set before us the personages of the New Testament, and is so desperately graphic that whenever he catches sight of anything which will make a picture, he is at it with pencil and brush, whether it is connected with his subject or not. Thus in vol. v. he gives us twenty or thirty pages of pictures from the life of Nero, à propos of the subject of the conquering Cross. And, indeed, as for these pictures, all we get from them is but a few flashes of colour, a kind of fireworks which illuminate the person of the exhibitor better than any other object. We are never allowed to forget the author himself nor the contempt which he affects towards his opponents in this nineteenth century. The only person of whom we obtain a definite picture is Mr. Haweis.

No one can complain that he labours to hide his own personality. Indeed some of his self-revelations are involuntary, and force upon us the doubt whether he quite possesses the qualities requisite for the task of restating the doctrines of Christianity in a better form than that in which St. Paul left them. We are not impressed by the attainments of a gentleman who can write,' the "amare aliquid " lay in the Gnostic denying to Jesus anything but a phantom existence,' 1 or who thinks that the price at which a horse or a chariot could be exported from Egypt in Solomon's time is the 'cab and horse fare' into that country, and proves therefore how readily the descent into Egypt might be made.2 A hundred and twelve pounds would have been rather dear for humble people. He also conceives that the word 'phenomenon ' refers only to extraordinary or unusual facts, for he thinks it necessary to inform us that 'personally he believes in a phenomenal ele2 The Picture of Jesus, 18.

1 The Story of the Four, 109.

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