figure manifestly taken from the Old Testament, where it frequently refers to the cup of wrath meted out by God (see e.g. Ps. 75:8, Is. 51:17, 22 ff, Jer. 49:12 f, Lam. 4:21); it is antecedently likely that the metaphor of baptism was also taken from common usage, for which there exist both wider precedents and reasonably close parallels, in Scripture and profane writings.1 There is therefore some reason for assuming that the verb ‘baptize’ was capable of yielding a literal and a figurative sense,