Cyril of Alexandria, in his writing against the Emperor Julian, expresses himself thus: "I would speak of baptism but that I fear my words would reach them who are not initiated." At that time there was no worship without its mysteries, its associations, its catechumens, its initiated, and its professed. Each sect required new virtues and recommended to its penitents a new life--_"initium novæ vitæ"_--whence the word initiation. The initiation of Christians, whether male or female, consisted in their being plunged quite naked into a tub of cold water, to which sign was attached the remission of all their sins. But the difference between Christian baptism and the Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, and Roman ceremonies was the difference between truth and falsehood. Jesus Christ was the High Priest of the new law. In the second century infants began to be baptized; it was natural that the Christians should desire their children, who would have been damned without this sacrament, to be provided with it. It was at length concluded that they must receive it at the expiration of eight days, because that was the period at which, among the Jews, they were circumcised. In the Greek Church this is still the custom. Such as died in the first week were damned, according to the most rigorous fathers of the Church. But Peter Chrysologos, in the fifth century, imagined limbo, a sort of mitigated hell, or properly, the border, the outskirt of hell, whither all infants dying without baptism go and where the patriarchs remained until Jesus Christ's descent into hell. So that the opinion that Jesus Christ descended into limbo, and not into hell, has since then prevailed. It was agitated whether a Christian in the deserts of Arabia might be baptized with sand, this was answered in the negative. It was asked if rosewater might be used, it was decided that pure water would be necessary but that muddy water might be made use of. It is evident that all this discipline depended on the discretion of the first pastors who established it. The Anabaptists and some other communions out of the pale have thought that no one should be baptized without a thorough knowledge of the merits of the case. You require, say they, a promise to be of the Christian society, but a child can make no engagement. You give it a sponsor, but this is an abuse of an ancient custom. The precaution was requisite in the first establishment. When strangers, adult men and women, came and presented themselves to be received into the society and share in the alms there was needed a guarantee to answer for their fidelity; it was necessary to make sure of them; they swore they would be Jews, but an infant is in a diametrically opposite case. It has often happened, that a child baptized by Greeks at Constantinople has afterwards been circumcised by Turks, a Christian at eight days old and a Mussulman at thirty years, he has betrayed the oaths of his godfather.