Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I do not know whether anything more is stirred up on the question of baptism. I will, however, go back and pick up a thread I dropped above, so as not to seem to be cutting off points that still hang over us. There is, altogether, only one baptism for us — both by the Lord's gospel and by the apostle's letters — since there is a single God, a single baptism, and a single church situated in the heavens. But as for how one ought to conduct oneself toward heretics, that is a matter worth a proper discussion of its own, worthily undertaken. As for us, it has been handed down clearly: heretics have no share at all in our discipline; the very withdrawal of communion with them testifies that they are outsiders. I am not obliged to recognize in them what has been prescribed for me, because their God is not our God, nor is their Christ one and the same as ours; and so their washing cannot be reckoned identical with ours, since it is a different thing altogether. Since they do not have it in its proper form, without doubt they do not have it at all, and what is not possessed cannot be counted; and so they cannot receive it, because they do not have it. But on this subject I have already treated more fully in my Greek work. So then: we go down into the washing once, our offenses are washed away once, because these things ought not be repeated. The Jew of Israel, by contrast, washes daily, because he is dirtied daily. And so that this should not become our practice too, it was fixed as a single washing. Happy is the water that washes once — that is no laughingstock to sinners, that is not fouled again and again by the buildup of filth so as to dirty afresh those it has already cleansed.