The newly baptized Christian received the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands (Acts 8:12, 8:17). The receipt of the Holy Spirit placed the individual into the body of Christ which was the church. The practice, in an attenuated form, continued beyond the Apostolic Age into the Greco-Roman Church. Stanley explained it this way:

In the first age of the Church it was customary for the apostles to lay their hands on the heads of the newly baptized converts, that they might receive the "gifts of the Spirit." The "gifts " vanished, but the custom of laying on of hands remained. It remained, and was continued, and so in the Greek Church is still continued, at the baptism of children as of adults. Confirmation is, with them, simultaneous with the act of the baptismal immersion. But the Latin Church, whilst it adopted or retained the practice of admitting infants to baptism, soon set itself to remedy the obvious defect arising from their unconscious age, by separating and postponing, and giving a new life a meaning to the rite of confirmation. The two ceremonies, which in the Eastern Church are indissoluble, confounded, are now, throughout Western Christendom, by a salutary innovation, each made to minister to the edification of the individual, and completion of the whole baptismal ordinance. (Stanley 1862:117-118.)

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Page last edited: 01/26/06 07:12 PM

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