93. Confirmation. (Chapter 7. Public Worship and Religious Customs and Ceremonies.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

Comp. the Literature of Baptism, especially Hoefling, and Zezschwitz: Der Katechumenat (first vol. of his System der Katechetik). Leipzig, 1863.

Confirmation, in the first centuries, was closely connected with the act of baptism as the completion of that act, especially in adults. After the cessation of proselyte baptism and the increase of infant baptism, it gradually came to be regarded as an independent sacrament. Even by Augustine, Leo I., and others, it is expressly called sacramentum. This independence was promoted by the hierarchical interest, especially in the Latin church, where the performance of this rite is an episcopal function.

The catholic theory of confirmation is, that it seals and completes the grace of baptism, and at the same time forms in some sense a subjective complement to infant baptism, in which the baptized person, now grown to years of discretion, renews the vows made by his parents or sponsors in his name at his baptism, and makes himself personally responsible for them. The latter, however, is more properly a later Protestant (Lutheran and Anglican) view. Baptism, according to the doctrine of the ancient church, admits the man into the rank of the soldiers of Christ; confirmation endows him with strength and courage for the spiritual warfare.

The outward form of confirmation consists in the anointing of the forehead, the nose, the ear, and the breast with the consecrated oil, or a mixture of balsam, which symbolizes the consecration of the whole man to the spiritual priesthood; and in the laying on of the hands of the clergyman, which signifies and effects the communication of the Holy Ghost for the general Christian calling. The anointing takes precedence of the imposition of hands, in agreement with the Old Testament sacerdotal view; while in the Protestant church, wherever confirmation continues, it is entirely abandoned, and only the imposition of hands is retained.

In other respects considerable diversity prevailed in the different parts of the ancient church in regard to the usage of confirmation and the time of performing it.

In the Greek church every priest may administer confirmation or holy unction, and that immediately after baptism; but in the Latin church after the time of Jerome (as now in the Anglican) this function, like the power of ordination, was considered a prerogative of the bishops, who made periodical tours in their dioceses to confirm the baptized. Thus the two acts were often far apart in time.