Let Them Come While Learning

But those whose office it is know that baptism is not to be administered rashly. “Give to everyone who asks you” has a reference of its own, and belongs particularly to giving to the poor. The rule to be looked at carefully here is rather this one: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs, and do not throw your pearls in front of pigs”; and, “Do not lay hands easily on anyone; do not share in other men’s sins.” [a]

If Philip baptized the eunuch so easily, let us keep in mind that a plain and unmistakable proof that the Lord judged the man worthy had come first. The Spirit had told Philip to go out to that road. And the eunuch himself was not found idle, nor was he a man suddenly seized with an eager whim to be baptized. He had gone up to the temple to pray, and he was hard at work on the divine Scripture. That is how he was found — a suitable man, to whom God had sent an apostle unasked, and whom the Spirit then told that apostle to join at his chariot. The passage he was reading falls in with his faith at exactly the right moment. Philip is asked, and is taken up to sit beside him. The Lord is pointed out. Faith does not hang back. The water needs no waiting for. The work is finished, and the apostle is snatched away.

“But Paul, too, was in fact baptized in a hurry.” Yes — because Simon, his host, had quickly recognized him as a chosen instrument. God’s approval sends sure signs on ahead of itself. Any request, on the other hand, can both deceive and be deceived.

And so, taking each person’s circumstances and disposition, and even age, into account, it is better to delay baptism — above all in the case of small children. For if baptism itself is not so necessary, why should the sponsors be pushed into danger as well? They may die and fail to keep their promises, or be let down by an evil character developing in the ones they stood for. The Lord does say, “Do not stop them from coming to me.” Then let them come while they are growing up. Let them come while they are learning, while they are being taught where they are coming to. Let them become Christians when they have become able to know Christ. Why should an innocent stretch of life hurry to the forgiveness of sins? People act with more caution in ordinary business: a man who is not trusted with earthly property is trusted with what is God’s! Let them learn how to ask for salvation, so that you may at least be seen to have given “to him who asks.”

The unmarried must be put off for no smaller reason. Temptation lies ready for them — for those who have never married, through their coming of age, and for the widowed, through their freedom — until they either marry or are strengthened enough for self-control. Anyone who understands how weighty baptism is will be more afraid of receiving it than of delaying it. Sound faith is sure of its salvation.

Passover provides a more than usually solemn day for baptism, since it was then that the Lord’s suffering, into which we are baptized, was completed. Nor will it be out of place to take it as a figure that, when the Lord was about to keep the last Passover, he said to the disciples sent ahead to prepare it, “You will meet a man carrying water.” He marks out the place for keeping the Passover by the sign of water. [i]

After that, Pentecost is a most joyful stretch of time for conferring baptisms. In it the Lord’s resurrection was proved again and again among the disciples, and the hope of the Lord’s coming was pointed to indirectly, since it was at that season, once he had been taken back into the heavens, that the angels told the apostles he would come in the same way as he had gone up into the heavens — at Pentecost, of course. And when Jeremiah says, “And I will gather them from the ends of the land on the feast day,” he means the day of Passover and of Pentecost, which is properly a feast day. But every day is the Lord’s. Every hour, every season, is fit for baptism. If there is a difference in the solemnity, there is none in the grace.

Those who are about to come to baptism ought to pray with repeated prayers, with fasting and kneeling and vigils all night through, and with the confession of all their past sins — so as to act out the meaning even of John’s baptism: “They were baptized,” Scripture says, “confessing their own sins.” We have reason to be thankful if we now confess our wrongs and our shameful acts openly. For at one and the same time we make amends for our former sins by disciplining flesh and spirit, and we lay a foundation of defenses in advance against the temptations that will follow close behind. [l]

“Watch and pray,” the Lord says, “so that you do not fall into temptation.” And the reason they were tempted, I believe, was that they fell asleep — so that they deserted the Lord when he was arrested, and the one who did stand by him and used the sword even denied him three times. For a word had gone before that too: that no one untempted reaches the heavenly kingdoms.

Temptations closed in on the Lord himself immediately after his baptism, when he had kept a fast for forty days. “Then it is right for us, too, to fast after baptism.” Well — and who is stopping you, unless it is the necessity of rejoicing and the thanksgiving for salvation? But as far as my poor powers can understand, the Lord was turning back on Israel, in a figure, the reproach Israel had thrown at the Lord. For the people, after crossing the sea and being carried about in the desert for forty years, were fed there with supplies from God and still thought more about their belly and their throat than about God. So the Lord, driven off into desert places after his own baptism, kept a fast of forty days and showed that the man of God lives “not by bread alone” but “by the word of God,” and that the temptations that come with a full stomach or an unrestrained appetite are broken by going without.

Therefore, blessed ones, for whom the grace of God is waiting: when you come up out of that most sacred washing of your new birth, and spread out your hands for the first time in your mother’s house along with your brothers and sisters, ask the Father, ask the Lord, that his own special gifts of grace and distributions of gifts may be supplied to you. “Ask,” he says, “and you will receive.” Well — you have asked, and you have received; you have knocked, and it has been opened to you. Only, I beg you, when you are asking, remember Tertullian the sinner too.