On Baptism 13

Here, then, those most wicked people raise questions. They go so far as to say, “Baptism is not necessary for those for whom faith is enough; for Abraham too pleased God by the sacrament of no water, but of faith.” But in all things later things are decisive, and what follows prevails over what went before. Granted that in the past there was salvation through bare faith, before the Lord's passion and resurrection. But when faith was enlarged to believing in his birth, passion, and resurrection, an amplification was added to the sacrament: the sealing of baptism, a clothing, as it were, of faith, which was formerly bare and now has no power without its own law. For the law of dipping has been imposed and its form prescribed. “Go,” he says, “teach the nations, dipping them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The definition joined to this law, “Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” has bound faith to the necessity of baptism. Accordingly, all believers from then on were dipped. Then Paul too, when he believed, was dipped. And this is what the Lord had commanded in that affliction of blindness, saying, “Arise and go into Damascus; there it will be shown you what you must do,” namely, be dipped, which alone was lacking to him. Otherwise he had learned and believed enough: that the Nazarene was the Lord, the Son of God.