Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Bearing this pronouncement in mind as a standing rule, we go on to discuss, regardless, just how foolish and impossible it is for a man to be remade by water. Since this material has indeed earned the office of so great a dignity, I think the authority of the liquid element ought to be established. And in fact a great deal is available, going right back to the beginning. [2] For one point is this: that water is one of the things which, before any furnishing of the world at all, still unshaped in appearance, rested with God in the beginning. "In the beginning," it says, "God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters." Here you have, man, first of all, the age of water to revere, in that it is an ancient substance; and then its dignity, in that it was the seat of the divine Spirit — more favored, clearly, than the other elements at that time. For the darkness was still wholly without the ordering of the stars, shapeless; the deep was dismal, the earth unready, the heavens raw; only the liquid element — always a finished, joyful, simple material, pure in its own right — offered itself as a fit vehicle for God. [3] What of the fact that from that point the ordering of the world was established by God through waters that, in a manner of speaking, set the measure? For to hang the firmament of heaven in the middle, he did it by separating the waters; to spread out the dry land, he accomplished it by parting the waters. [4] Then, once the world had been arranged through its elements and its inhabitants were to be supplied, it was the waters that first received the command to bring forth living souls: the liquid element was the first to produce what would live, so let no one be surprised that in baptism waters know how to give life. [5] For was not the very shaping of man himself, too, completed with water's cooperation? Matter was taken from the earth — well and good — but it was not workable unless moist and sodden, which the waters, separated before the fourth day, had already tempered into mud at their post, the moisture still lingering. [6] If from this point I were to go on rehearsing everything, or even a good deal more, that could be said in praise of this element's authority — how great its force or its favor, how many are its powers, how many its offices, how much service it renders the world — I fear I should seem to be gathering up praises of water rather than an account of baptism. Though it would let me show all the more fully that there is no need to doubt that the matter which God arranged in all his affairs and works, he also made obedient in his own sacraments — that what governs earthly life also serves heavenly things as well.