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Introduction
Unfortunately, nearly every Church so founded in the past hundred years has proved to be fissiparous, splitting by mutual excommunication or repudiation into new Churches, multiplying the number as they become reduced in membership. In all this there is a queer mixture of the irrepressible, the ridiculous and the pathetic; naive goodness and sincere idealism, unconscious vanity and, at times, conscious roguery: its promoters frequently unstable to a degree, eccentric in some cases to the point of craziness, moving in a dream-world of unreality. A marked characteristic of this dream-world is a folie de grandeur of high-sounding titles and more than extravagant pretensions; these generally in inverse ratio to the number of their adherents and the size of the conventicles in which they worship and still worship, with elaborate ritual and ceremonial.
There is considerable irony in the historical fact that had St Cyprian's common sense and logical view that heretical baptism was wholly invalid won its way in the mind of the Church, bishops at large would have been impossible; no one would have believed in their orders but themselves, and excommunication would have rendered orders immediately invalid, with the problem of knowing where authority lay as the only way of settling the problem of validity. St Cyprian held that it was obvious that a sacrament apart from the authority and communion of the Catholic Church was ipso facto invalid and must be repeated. He was opposed in this by the contemporary Bishop of Rome, Pope Stephen, who believed in the contrary view as an apostolic tradition handed down in his see. This view became an insight in the mind of the Church and grew in influence till it possessed the whole of the West. In the East the Cyprianic view held its grounds and survived until modern times, though it has now virtually disappeared. Nowadays, the Orthodox do not re-baptise or re-ordain; their acceptance of heretical or schismatic baptism and orders, if validly performed, is covered by the theory of 'economy'.
Today we see more clearly the leading of the Holy Spirit in the Church's farseeing but apparently illogical insight, God wills all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. The sacrament of baptism is the sacrament which gives entrance to the Church, and the Church is the sole ark of salvation to all. The saving sacrament then must be made as available as it can possibly be. The same insight, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, has led to the development of the doctrine of baptism by desire both
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