let her son Augustine
be baptized in boyhood, though he clamoured to be. She was a conservative.
In the Greek world thirty was a usual age in the 4th century for persons to
be baptized, in imitation of Christ. It is still the age preferred by the
Baptists of Armenia. But it was often delayed until the deathbed, for the
primitive idea that mortal sins committed after baptism were sins against
the Holy Spirit and unforgivable, still influenced men, and survived among
the Cathars up to the 14th century. The fathers, however, of the 4th
century emphasized already the danger of deferring the rite until men fall
into mortal sickness, when they may be unconscious or paralysed or
otherwise unable to profess their faith and repentance, or to swallow the
viaticum. Gregory Theologus therefore (_c._ 340) suggests the age of three
years as suitable for baptism, because by then a child is old enough, if
not to understand the questions put to him, at any rate to speak and make
the necessary responses. Gregory sanctions the baptism of infants only
where there is imminent danger of death. "It is better that they should be
sanctified without their own sense of it than that they pass away unsealed
and uninitiated." And he justifies his view by this, that circumcision,
which foreshadowed the Christian seal ([Greek: sphragis]), was imposed on
the eighth day on those who as yet had no use of reason. He also urges the
analogue of "the anointing of the doorposts, which preserved the first-born
by things that have no sense." On such grounds was justified the transition
of a baptism which began as a spontaneous act of [v.03 p.0367]
self-consecration into an _opus operatum_. How long after this it was
before infant baptism became normal inside the Byzantine church, we do not
exactly know, but it was natural that mothers should insist on their
children being liberated from Satan and safeguarded from demons as soon as
might be. The change came more quickly in Latin than in Greek Christendom,
and very slowly indeed in the Armenian and Georgian churches. Augustine's
insistence on original sin, a doctrine never quite accepted in his sense in
the East, hurried on the change.

7. _Confirmation._--In the West, however, the sacrament has been saved from
becoming merely magical by the rite of confirmation or of reception of the
Spirit being separated from the baptism of regeneration and reserved for an
adult age. The English church confirms at fifteen or six