Calvin keeps pressing confirmation. The apostles laid hands on the Samaritans so that visible gifts of the Spirit might be seen. Those signs marked the first preaching of the gospel. They were for a time. They have ceased. To copy the gesture without the gift is, he says, an empty mimicry.

Still more, oil cannot be called the oil of salvation. Baptism already buries us with Christ and clothes us with him. What God promised there must not be stolen and given to chrism. Unction does not finish the Christian. It must not be set above the water Christ commanded.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 6–10

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Today Calvin turns from the two sacraments Christ actually instituted to the five rites later crowded in beside them. The question is not a quarrel over a word. If a sacrament is a visible seal of God’s own promise, then God alone can institute it. Where there is no command and no promise, oil remains oil.

He then takes up confirmation. The ancient church brought baptized children, once grown, to confess the faith with the laying on of hands as a solemn blessing. Calvin would restore that use. What he will not grant is a later sacrament of chrism that claims to confer the Spirit without a word from God.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 1–5

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

Calvin will not spend this last stretch on the traffic, the fees, the private stalls. He wants the mass in its cleanest dress, and still calls it Satan’s strongest engine against the kingdom of Christ—a Helen for whom men commit spiritual whoredom. Then he closes the two sacraments: Baptism once, as entrance; the Supper often, as the family’s food. No third. A sacrament is God’s promise with God’s sign. All the world together cannot invent a pledge of salvation.

Israel had extra figures because the better thing had not yet come. We have Christ. In him the treasures are already hid. To hunger for a new ordinance is to offend the Father who has spoken in the Son in these last days. Human additions dilute the wine. Pomp smothers the word, without which a sacrament is no sacrament. Baptism is barely seen under the ceremony. The Supper was buried when it became the Mass, and at best is hauled out once a year, torn.

### Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 18–20

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