upon him as more sacred than before.  Lord says that they bring the water for this purpose in bark of the Holm-tree; that tree is in truth the Haum of the Magi, of which we spoke before on another occasion.  Sometimes also it is otherwise done by immersing him in a large vessel of water, as Tavernier tells us.  After such washing, or baptism, the priest imposes on the child the name given by his parents’” ("Christian Records,” Rev. Dr. Giles, p. 129).

“The Baptismal fonts in our Protestant churches, and we can hardly say more especially the little cisterns at the entrance of our Catholic chapels, are not imitations, but an unbroken and never interrupted continuation of the same aquaminaria, or amula, which the learned Montfaucon, in his ‘Antiquities,’ shows to have been vases of holy water, which were placed by the heathens at the entrance of their temples, to sprinkle themselves with upon entering those sacred edifices” ("Diegesis,” R. Taylor, p. 219).  Among the Hindus, to bathe in the Ganges is to be regenerated, and the water is holy because it flows from Brahma’s feet.  Tertullian, arguing that water, as being God’s earliest and most favoured creation, and brooded over by the spirit—­Vishnu also is called Narayan, “moving on the waters”—­was sanctifying in its nature, says:  “’Well, but the nations, who are strangers to all understanding of spiritual powers, ascribe to their idols the imbuing of waters with the self-same efficacy.’  So they do, but these cheat themselves with waters which are widowed.  For washing is the channel through which they are initiated into some sacred rites of some notorious Isis or Mithra; and the gods themselves likewise they honour by washings....  At the Appollinarian and Eleusinian games they are baptised; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is the regeneration, and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries....  Which fact, being acknowledged, we recognise here also the zeal of the devil rivalling the things of God, while we find him, too, practising baptism in his subjects” ("On Baptism,” chap. v.).  As “the devil” did it first, it seems scarcely fair to accuse him of copying.

Closely allied to baptism is the idea of regeneration, being born again.  In baptism the purification is wrought by the male deity, typified in the water flowing from the throne or the feet of the god.  In regeneration without water the purification is wrought by the female deity.  The earth is the mother of all, and “as at birth the new being emerges from the mother, so it was supposed that emergence from a terrestrial cleft was equivalent to a new birth” (Inman’s “Ancient Faiths,” vol. i., p. 415; ed. 1868).  Hence the custom of squeezing through a hole in a rock, or passing through a perforated stone, or between and under stones set up for the purpose; a natural cleft in a rock or in the earth was considered as specially holy, and to some of these long pilgrimages are still made in Eastern lands.  On emerging from the hole, the devotee is re-born, and the sins of the past are no longer counted against him.