Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] After this, the hand is laid on, through a blessing that calls upon and invites the Holy Spirit. Now if human skill can summon a spirit into water and, by hands laid over it, animate the union of the two with another spirit of no such great brightness — shall it not be permitted to God, working through his own instrument, to modulate through holy hands the sublimity of the Spirit? [2] But this too comes from an ancient sacrament, by which Jacob blessed his grandsons by Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, laying his hands on their heads and crossing them over one another — crossing them, in fact, in such a way, slanted across each other, that even then, by shaping a figure of Christ, they were foreshadowing the blessing that was to be in Christ. [3] Then that most holy Spirit, gladly, from the Father, comes down upon bodies now cleansed and blessed, and settles upon the waters of baptism, recognizing them, as it were, as his former seat: coming down over the Lord in a dove's likeness, in order that the character proper to the Holy Spirit should be made known by way of a creature marked by innocence and gentleness, since even in body the dove lacks that very gall of bitterness. [4] And so he says, 'Be simple as doves' — nor does even this lack the support of a figure that came earlier: for just as, once the deluge had washed away that primeval wickedness — the world's baptism, one might say — the dove released from the ark, coming back bearing an olive twig, brought word to the earth that heaven's wrath had fallen silent into peace (a token that even the pagans still take as peace's emblem) — in that identical pattern, transposed to the spirit, for the earth here means our flesh, as it rises from the wash cleansed of its former sins, the dove that is the Holy Spirit comes flying to it, carrying God's peace, dispatched from those heavens in which the church resides, the figure represented by the ark. [5] 'But the world sinned again — which makes for a bad comparison between baptism and the flood.' And so it is destined for fire — just as the man who, after baptism, builds his sins back up is likewise destined for fire — so that this too should be taken as a sign for our warning.