Baptism

So that the privileges of the new birth are most necessary in their case.

For since their heresy is, as it were, an offshoot of the Marcionists, who abhor marriage and turn away from wine, and say that the creation of God is defiled, we do not receive them into the Church unless they are baptized into our baptism.

and so some of them set themselves to receive a second baptism as well—I mean the one through blood and martyrdom.

For we know that this divine profession is a procurer of sinlessness and a fellow-worker of the incorruption given to us through holy baptism.

Yet it does not take away free will, nor does it carry forgiveness of the sins committed after baptism, nor a second descent into the font.

For this tree was then in the mystery by which Moses sweetened the bitter water, from which the people, perishing of thirst in the wilderness, revived by drinking — just as we, drawn out from the calamities of the world, in which we dwelt perishing of thirst (that is, deprived of the divine word), have revived by drinking in faith, which is in him, the water of baptism from the tree of Christ's pa …

then buried together with Christ in baptism, and raised together in Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.

Thence, then, having attained resurrection by faith, they are with the Lord when they have put Him on in baptism.

For if the Christian is he who, having received from God the Father a substance — surely of baptism, surely of the Holy Spirit, and thence of eternal hope — and having wandered far from the Father, squanders it by living after the heathen manner;

In short, "to the destruction," he says, "of the flesh," not to its torment — damning the very substance through which he had fallen, which thereafter had now perished, baptism being lost — "that the spirit," he says, "may be safe in the day of the Lord.