The great Orthodox Father of the 19th century, Bishop Theophan the Recluse, writes that the gift of the Holy Spirit is given “precisely through the Sacrament of Chrismation, which was introduced by the Apostles in place of the laying on of hands” (which is the form the Sacrament takes in the Acts of the Apostles). “We all — who have been baptized and chrismated — have the gift of the Holy Spirit...even though it is not active in everyone.” The Orthodox Church provides the means for making this gift active, and “there is no other path.... Without the Sacrament of Chrismation, just as earlier
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