is reading is bound up the
entire adoptionist school of Christology. It apparently underlies the
symbolizing of Christ as a fish in the art of the catacombs, and in the
literature of the 2nd century. Tertullian prefaces with this idea his work
on baptism. _Nos pisciculi secundum_ [Greek: ICHTHUN] _nostrum Jesum
Christum in aqua nascimur_. "We little fishes, after the example of our
_Fish_ Jesus Christ, are _born_ in the water." So about the year 440 the
Gaulish poet Orientius wrote of Christ; _Piscis natus aquis, auctor
baptismatis ipse est_. "A fish born of the waters is himself originator of
baptism."

But before his time and within a hundred years of Tertullian this symbolism
in its original significance had become heretical, and the orthodox were
thrown back on another explanation of it. This was that the word [Greek:
ICHTHUS] is made up of the letters which begin the Greek words meaning
"Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour." An entire mythology soon grew up
around the idea of re-birth. The font was viewed as the womb of the virgin
mother church, who was in some congregations, for example, in the early
churches of Gaul, no abstraction, but a divine aeon watching over and
sympathizing with the children of her womb, the recipient even of hymns of
praise and humble supplications. Other mythoplastic growths succeeded, one
of which must be noticed. The sponsors or _anadochi_, who, after the
introduction of infant baptism came to be called god-fathers and
god-mothers, were really in a spiritual relation to the children they took
up out of the font. This relation was soon by the canonists identified with
the blood-tie which connects real parents with their offspring, and the
corollary drawn that children, who in baptism had the same god-parent, were
real brothers and sisters, who might not marry either each the other or
real children of the said god-parent. The reformed churches have set aside
this fiction, but in the Latin and Eastern churches it has created a
distinct and very powerful marriage taboo.

10. _Relation to Repentance._--Baptism justified the believer, that is to
say, constituted him a saint whose past sins were abolished. Sin after
baptism excluded the sinner afresh from the divine grace and from the
sacraments. He fell back into the status of a catechumen, and it was much
discussed from the 2nd century onwards whether he could be restored to the
church at all, and, if so, how. A rite was devised, called _exho