but rather that which, a little later,
partly unconsciously, animated the Church in rejecting Marcionism--the
conviction that there is no essential disharmony or {84} final clash in
history, that the God of creation is not hostile to the God of grace.[6]

Moreover, it was not only--or even chiefly--the helping hand of grace
in the troubles and sorrows of life which Greek Christians especially
hoped for by union with the supreme God or by the power of Jesus. It
was rather the gift of eternal Life after death, which was the special
characteristic of the Gods. The points of importance are the means
whereby they thought that this immortality was obtained, and the nature
which they ascribed to it.

The act by which the faithful acquired immortality was Baptism. The
history of this distinctively Christian rite is obscure. From the
standpoint of the historian of religions it is the combination of a
Jewish ceremony with Graeco-Oriental ideas. The Jews had frequently
practised ceremonial washing with a religious significance--generally
speaking, purification from the guilt of offences against the ritual
law; it was also part of the initiation of proselytes, and had been
largely practised by John the Forerunner. But in no case did any Jew
think that washing could change, sacramentally or magically, the nature
of man. A Greek on the other hand, brought up in the atmosphere of the
mysteries, might well have thought so. The same is true of the other
constituent element in primitive Christian Baptism--the formula "in the
{85} name of the Lord Jesus." There is no reason why Jews should not
have used the name of Jesus for magical purposes--indeed they
undoubtedly did so--for magic was not peculiar to the Greeks. But the
ordinary Jew would never have practised magic to secure immortality or
to become divine. He believed that immortality was the natural lot of
all the chosen people who kept the Law, and would be reached, not
through sacraments or secret knowledge, but through the resurrection at
the last day. Thus it is possible that the first Jewish Christians may
have practised baptism by an extension of the ordinary ritual of
proselyte-making, or as a means of securing remission of sins, in the
spirit of John the Baptist, but it is extremely improbable that it was
for them the sacrament of regeneration to eternal life which it was
held to be by Greek Christians.

Turning from the possibilities and probabilities suggeste