ages. This being so, it is of
the deepest interest to study the Cathar cult, since through its rites
we can get a glimpse of those of the primitive church, about which want
of documents leaves us too often in the dark."

The central Cathar rite was _consolamentum_, or baptism with spirit and
fire. The spirit received was the Paraclete derived from God and sent by
Christ, who said, "The Father is greater than I." Of a consubstantial
Trinity the Cathars naturally had never heard. Infant baptism they
rejected because it was unscriptural, and because all baptism with water
was an appanage of the Jewish demiurge Jehovah, and as such expressly
rejected by Christ.

The _consolamentum_ removes original sin, undoes the sad effects of the
primal fall, clothes upon us our habitation which is from heaven,
restores to us the lost tunic of immortality. A Consoled is an angel
walking in the flesh, whom the thin screen of death alone separates from
Christ and the beatific vision. The rite was appointed by Christ, and
has been handed down from generation to generation by the _boni
homines_.

The long probation called "abstinence" which led up to it is a survival
of the primitive catechumenate with its scrutinies. The prostrations of
the _credens_ before the Perfect were in their manner and import
identical with the prostrations of the catechumen before the exorcist.
We find the same custom in the Celtic church of St Columba. Just as at
the third scrutiny the early catechumen passed a last examination in the
Gospels, Creed and Lord's Prayer, so after their year of abstinence the
credens receives creed and prayer; the allocution with which the elder
"handed on" this prayer is preserved, and of it the Abbe Guiraud remarks
that, if it were not in a Cathar ritual, one might believe it to be of
Catholic origin. It is so Christian in tone, he quaintly remarks
elsewhere, that an inquisitor might have used it quite as well as a
heretic. In it the Perfect addresses the postulant, as in the
corresponding Armenian rite, by the name of Peter; and explains to him
from Scripture the indwelling of the spirit in the Perfect, and his
adoption as a son by God. The Lord's Prayer is then repeated by the
postulant after the elder, who explains it clause by clause; the words
_panis superstantialis_ being interpreted not of the material but of
the spiritual bread, which consists of the Words of Life.

There followed the Renunciation, primitive enough in f