and believe that
what we teach and say is truth, and undertake to be able to live
accordingly, are instructed to pray and to entreat God with fasting
for the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting
with them. Then they are brought by us where there is water and are
regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated.
For, in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the Universe, and of
our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the
washing with water."

Other writers of the period under consideration, however, praise the
saving efficacy of baptism in the most exalted terms. According to
their minds, it is the actual means of the redemption of sins, not
a mere literal rite expressing ceremonially the work of God's Spirit
within the heart; it is an illumination; it extinguishes the fire
of sin; it removes the unclean spirits from men and seals them for
heaven. Tertullian wrote extensively on this subject. In his work
On Baptism, chapters 3 to 8, he maintains the doctrine of baptismal
regeneration "by which we are washed from the sins of our former
blindness and set free for eternal life." He declares that by this act
men are prepared to receive the Holy Ghost; that in the literal act,
"the spirit is corporeally washed in the waters, and the flesh is, in
the same, spiritually cleansed." Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (third
century), in his treatise concerning the Baptism of Heretics, teaches
the same doctrine in no uncertain terms.

[Sidenote: Other erroneous doctrines and practises]

The limits of this work preclude the historic treatment of the rise
and development of the host of false doctrines and practises that
finally bound the people in the thralldom of superstition and plunged
the world into the darkness of spiritual night. One who is free from
such influences can scarcely read without feelings of disgust the
elaborate treatises of these church fathers wherein they extol the
virtues of virginity as forming a new order of life, as an evidence of
divinity, as making virgins while in this world "equal to the angels
of God," and as a certain surety of special rewards in heaven. From
this false standard proceeded at length the celibacy of the clergy and
monkery with all their attendant evils. And the time would fail me to
tell of the introduction of images and image-worship in the Western
Church and of that superstitious regard for miserable relics of every