‘If you have faith’, St Cyril of Jerusalem tells his catechumens, ‘you won’t only receive remission of your sins, you’ll also do things beyond the power of man. Please God, you’ll receive the gift of prophecy.’

In the previous two articles, we have been dissecting the Pente-costal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that the strict New Testament teaching is that the experience and the manifestation of the Spirit belong to sacramental baptism. However, even in the New Testament there is the puzzling case of the Samaritan converts who were baptized but didn’t receive the Spirit (which means, for Luke, simply that they did not show any visible sign of the Spirit; we should not interpolate Pauline considerations into the story). So spiritual writers of east and west have always had to allow that, all too often, baptized Christians live and feel as though they were still living under the Law, before the coming of faith.