On Baptism 5

But the heathen nations, strangers to all understanding of spiritual things, ascribe power with the same efficacy to their idols. But they deceive themselves with widowed waters. For they are initiated into certain rites by a washing, those of some Isis or Mithras; they even carry their gods themselves out to be washed. Moreover, they everywhere expiate country houses, homes, temples, and whole cities by sprinkling water carried around. Certainly at the Apollinarian and Eleusinian games they are dipped, and they suppose that they do this for their regeneration and the remission of the penalty of their perjuries. Likewise among the ancients, whoever had stained himself with homicide sought out purifying waters. If, then, they flatter themselves with hopes of cleansing from the mere nature of water, because it is the proper material for washing, how much more truly will waters render this through the authority of God, by whom their whole nature was constituted? If they think that water is medicated by religion, what religion is more powerful than that of the living God? Knowing this, we recognize here too the zeal of the devil, who rivals the things of God, since he too practices baptism among his own. What likeness is there? The unclean cleanses, the destroyer frees, the condemned acquits! He would, no doubt, destroy his own work by washing away sins which he himself inspires. These things are set down as a testimony against those who reject the faith, if they do not believe the things of God, whose imitations they believe in the case of God's rival. Do not unclean spirits at other times, too, without any sacrament, brood over waters, imitating that bearing of the divine Spirit in the beginning? All shady springs know it, and all remote streams, and the pools in baths, and the channels in houses, or cisterns and wells which are said to snatch people away, that is, through the force of a harmful spirit. For they call people … and frenzied and water-fearing, whom waters have killed or tormented with madness or dread. Why have we related these things? So that no one may think it too hard to believe that a holy angel of God is present to temper waters for man's salvation, when an evil angel frequents profane intercourse with the same element for man's ruin. If it seems novel that an angel should intervene in waters, an example of what was to come went before. An angel intervening used to stir the pool of Bethsaida. Those who complained of illness watched for it; for whoever had been first to go down there ceased to complain after the washing. This figure of bodily healing foretold spiritual healing, in the way in which carnal things always go before as figures of spiritual ones. So, as the grace of God advanced among men, more was added to the waters and to the angel. Those which used to remedy the defects of the body now heal the spirit; those which worked temporal health now restore eternal; those which set one person free once a year now save peoples daily, death being destroyed by the washing away of sins. For when the guilt is removed, the penalty is removed too. Thus man, who once had been in the image of God, will be restored to God, to his likeness. The image is reckoned in the form, the likeness in eternity. For he receives again that Spirit of God which he had then received from his breath, but had afterward lost through sin.