Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ASIATIC PAGAN WATER-WORSHIP. Fundamental Corruption of Christian Baptism through Pagan Water-Worship—" Baptismal Regeneration," the Product of Paganism—Spiritual Purity Sought through Pagan Baptism—Testimonies from Jam- blicus, Virgil, Ovid, Herodotus, Juvenal, and others—Baptism and Serpent-Worship—Baptism and Egyptian Sun-Worship—The Sacred Nile—The Prevalence of Water-Worship in India—Sacred Wells— Sacred Rivers—Modern Buddhistic and Modern Hindu Baptism. Corrupting Influence of Pagan Water- Worship. THE work of corrupting Christianity went forward systematically, as though an enemy planned to undermine its fundamental truths and ruin the Church through internal errors. When allegorical methods had shorn the Bible of authority, and pushed God, as represented in his word, far away from men, the next important step was to corrupt the developing Church by a false standard of membership, thus planting a sure seed of decay in its heart. In New Testament Christianity, baptism—submersion in water—was the outward symbol of a new spiritual life, beginning through faith and repentance. As such it had a specific meaning, and from the earliest times formed the door to membership in the Christian communities. He who accepted Christ as the Messiah, testified such acceptance by being "buried with him in baptism." This was the sign of an inward purity which entitled the believer to a place in the community, and to the fellowship of " those who believed." It was not the agent by which purity was produced, nor the source from which the new spiritual life sprung. All this was changed by introducing the pagan idea. The materials for such a corrupting process were fully developed in the pagan world. Various forms of baptism, and the doctrine of baptismal regeneration,...