Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/295

Rh for the cures and other signs of an association. To begin with, many wells which are resorted to for curing children's diseases are not, as far as we know, also used for baptism. But the most weighty objection to the baptismal explanation lies in the evidence I hope to be able to lead, which shows that in baptism we are dealing with a ceremony dependent upon a belief absolutely different from that which underlies the curing of children at wells, ponds, and rivers.

Now, in order that this difference may be made clear, it will be necessary to deviate considerably from the main line of our story and to investigate the subject of infant baptism, in order to discover, if we can, the causes which led to the ceremonial sprinkling of the new-born child with water. In prosecuting this search I have been led far afield among the nations of the world, but I will not attempt to do more than to sketch out my wanderings in the briefest possible manner.

The ceremonial washing, baptism, or lustration of children, is a rite as old, and as widespread almost, as the marriage rite. A religious ceremony is the sanctification of some common event of life—eating, drinking, birth, marriage, death, together with certain communal or national acts—whereby we contrive, for a moment, to rivet the public attention upon, and to obtain the public recognition of, the eternal mysteries which underlie that outward show we call our everyday life. Infant baptism, nowadays, is one of these suggestive ceremonies. At first, however, it was something much more simple. For it was only the hallowing of the necessary first bath of the new-born child, the bath of physical purification. Prior to this simple domestic act the child is actually, and in very truth, impure. The physical impurity, it would seem, suggested to the minds of our forefathers, in a manner familiar to the students of folk-lore, that the child is also mystically, or, as we would say in the