ught it advisable to delay baptism (cunctatio
baptismi) on account of the responsibility involved in it (pondus
baptismi). He says: "It is more advantageous to delay baptism,
especially in the case of little children. For why is it necessary for
the sponsors" (this is the first mention of "godparents") "also to be
thrust into danger?... let the little ones therefore come when they are
growing up; let them come when they are learning, when they are taught
where they are coming to; let them become Christians when they are able
to know Christ. Why does an age of innocence hasten to the remission of
sins? People will act more cautiously in worldly affairs, so that one
who is not trusted with earthly things is trusted with divine. Whoever
understands the responsibility of baptism will fear its attainment more
than its delay."[290] To all appearance the practice of immediately
baptising the children of Christian families was universally adopted in
the Church in the course of the third century. (Origen, Comment, in ep.
ad Rom. V. 9, Opp. IV. p. 565, declared child baptism to be a custom
handed down by the Apostles.) Grown up people, on the other hand,
frequently postponed baptism, but this habit was disapproved.[291]

The Lord's Supper was not only regarded as a sacrifice, but also as a
divine gift.[292] The effects of this gift were not theoretically fixed,
because these were excluded by the strict scheme[293] of baptismal grace
and baptismal obligation. But in practice Christians more and more
assumed a real bestowal of heavenly gifts in the holy food, and gave
themselves over to superstitious theories. This bestowal was sometimes
regarded as a spiritual and sometimes as a bodily self-communication of
Christ, that is, as a miraculous implanting of divine life. Here ethical
and physical, and again ethical and theoretical features were intermixed
with each other. The utterances of the Fathers to which we have access
do not allow us to classify these elements here; for to all appearance
not a single one clearly distinguished between spiritual and bodily, or
ethical and intellectual effects unless he was in principle a
spiritualist. But even a writer of this kind had quite as superstitious
an idea of the holy elements as the rest. Thus the holy meal was
extolled as the communication of incorruption, as a pledge of
resurrection, as a medium of the union of the flesh with the Holy
Spirit; and again as food of the soul, as the beare