A lively editorial page from January 26, 1935, touched on such topics as the activity of the Holy Spirit, the Roosevelts planning to serve wine at the White House (Prohibition had been repealed in 1933), and reaction to a Robert Benchley essay called “The Sunday Menace” (the humor author had suggested outrageous acts “to get rid of the dullness of midafternoon on Sunday”).
But the editorial we share
today is a measured, almost melancholy observation about how baptism is practiced
in the Roman Catholic Church.
_ _ _
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS
MISSING SOMETHING
Editorial; January 26,
1935; p. 4
There is a real mystery in the
fact that the Roman Catholic Church ever dropped immersion as the form of baptism.
The church had direct contact with those who practiced the original form, and
its own theologians admit immersion to be the form of Scriptural baptism. The
change in form was made by the Roman Church.
That, however, is not the real
cause of our marveling. What seems so strange to us is the fact that a church
that makes so much of pageantry should have lost entirely the wonderfully
dramatic elements in Christian baptism. Theoretically, the Roman Church has grasped
somewhat better than have the Protestants the fact that the Lord intended His
people to center their worship in certain great symbols. Protestants have, for
the most part, made too much of talk and mere reading. They have supposed that
it developed upon them to create masterful philosophies and explanations of
doctrine. The New Testament church centered everything in the breaking of
bread, a simple, but picturesque, memorial of the Lord and His death. While the
Roman Church has, of course, overdone the matter in the development of the elaborate
mass, it is nonetheless correct in putting the emphasis upon the picture rather
than upon the philosophy of theology.
It seems strange, therefore, that the Roman Church lost the other picture, which is even more vividbaptism as the burial and resurrection. What a distinct lapse in the Roman Church’s ordinary astuteness that was, in which, merely for case and convenience, she let slip from her hands this wonderful symbol of the soul’s death and resurrection, this outward picture of an inner rebirth, this washing away of sin.
And certainly there can not possibly be any restoration of the unity of the ancient church until there is restored to its place this picture of the great fact that the Roman church appreciates as the center of Christian faiththe death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord.
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