to the Bishop Presbyter, and received by the sign of the Cross88, with prayer and imposition of hands, to the status of Catechumens. We have a description by Eusebius89 of some of these ceremonies in the case of Con- stantine:  When the Emperor felt his life to be drawing to a close, “he poured forth his sup- plications and confessions to God, kneeling on the pavement in the Church itself, in which he also now for the first time received the imposition of hands with prayer.”  Soon after this the Bishops whom he had summoned to Nicomedia to give him Baptism, “performed the sacred ceremonies in the usual manner, and having given him the necessary instructions made him a partaker of the mystic ordinances.” Another ceremony used in the admission of Catechumens, at least in some Churches, mentioned by S. Augustine90:  “Sanctification is not of one kind only:  for I suppose that Catechumens also are sanctified in a certain way of their own by the sign of Christ’s Cross, and the Prayer of the Imposition of Hands; and that which they receive, though it be not the Body of Christ, is yet an holy thing, and more holy than the common food which sustains xxiii us, because it is a sacrament.”  From this passage it has been inferred that consecrated bread (εὐλογίαι, panis benedictus), taken out of the oblations provided for the Eucharist, was given to the Catechumens,—an opinion which seemed to have some support in the compar- ison between “that which the Catechumens receive,” and “the food which sustains us.”  But Bingham maintains91 that S. Augustine here refers only to the symbolical use of salt, of which he says in his Confessions, I. xi., that while yet a boy he “used to be marked with the sign of His Cross, and seasoned with His salt.”  The meaning of this so-called “Sacrament of the Catechumens” was that by the symbol of salt “they might learn to purge and cleanse their souls from sin.” In the African Church in the time of S. Augustine it was customary to anoint the new convert with exorcised oil at the time of his admission, but in the Eastern Church there seems to have been no such anointing until immediately before Baptism. Persons who had been thus admitted to the class of Catechumens were usually regarded as Christians, but only in a lower degree, being still clearly distinguished from the Faithful.  “Ask a man, Art thou a Christian?  If he is a Pagan or a Jew, he answers, I am not.  But if he say, I am, you ask him further, Catechumen or Faithful?  If he answer, Catechumen, he has been anointed, but not yet baptized92.”  Augustine, like Tertullian, complains that among 88 S. Aug. De Symbolo, Serm. ad Catechumenos, § 1:  “Ye have not yet been born again by holy Baptism, but by the sign of the Cross ye have been already conceived in the womb of your mother the Church.” 89 Vita Const. iv. c. 60. 90 De Peccatorum meritis, ii. 42. 91 Antiq. X. ii. § 16. 92 S. August. In Joh. Evang. Tract. xliv. § 2. 24 Catechetical Instruction.