Before the Constantinian accommodation with the church in the fourth century of our era, the church experienced a period of significant growth by adult conversions. Such converts moved into the life of Christ through the sacrament of baptism and experienced fully the move from darkness into the light, from love of sin into the abhorrence of wickedness, from ignorance to true knowledge, and from the counterfeit of life to real life. How bright and glittering that must have seemed in those days to break so decisively with the old pagan ways of the so obviously dying world and to begin to live the new life through being born again by water and the Word. There was nothing accommodating or obsequious about these conversions in those days when such a conversion could cost life, liberty, or limb. There was nothing presumed about this life. One did not stumble into Christianity, but one was just dying to enter it. This was a manly conversion which counted the full cost (1Co 12:11). Cyprian himself avoided one persecution (250) and then embraced death in the next (258). But he was able to embrace it with the shining clarity of the martyr who knew that from which he had been rescued and for what he had been rescued.

We who have lived within the eschaton of the now-crumbling Constantinian accommodation and who have been baptized as infants, quite wrongly, see without that shining clarity. We think martyrdom is far off. It is not. For the devil seethes under the surface of our world, ready to break the magma of our age with the rage of an ancient evil. There is no rhyme or reason to this evil because it is not subject the Logos, who is Wisdom incarnate. None can predict it. But there is reason for our clarity of vision. We have come through a martyrdom in the waters of the font which brings death and raises to new life. Death then, is not in some far off future, but it has been worked on us by God in the font where we are buried with Christ into His death. Death has been sown into us at the font. Our martyrdom has been begun and is already complete in the trial of the font. The font itself is the source of our clarity and that is the same no matter when we are buried with Christ; whether as an infant or an adult. For our baptism was never about us, but about Christ; His death and His life into which we have been placed.

"While I was still lying in darkness and gloomy night, wavering hither and thither, tossed about on the foam of this boastful age, and uncertain of my wandering steps, knowing nothing of my real life, and remote from truth and light, I used to regard it as a difficult matter, and especially as difficult in respect of my character at that time, that a man should be capable of being born again (Jn 3:4)--a truth which the divine mercy had announced for my salvation--and that a man quickened to a new life in the font of saving water should be able to put off what he had previously been; and, although retaining all his bodily structure, should be himself changed in heart and soul. I said, 'How is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has becomeinveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and radically ingrained within us.'

"These were my frequent thoughts. For as I myself was held in bonds by the innumerable errors of my previous life, from which I did not believe that I could possibly be delivered, so I was disposed to acquiesce in my clinging vices. Because I despaired of better things, I used to indulge my sins as if they were actually parts of me, and indigenous to me. But after that, by the help of the water of new birth, the stain of former years had been washed away, and a light from above, serene and pure, had been infused into my reconciled heart. After that, by the agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second birth had restored me to a new man. Then, in a wondrous manner, things I once thought doubtful began to assure themselves to me, hidden things to be revealed, dark things to be enlightened. What before had seemed difficult began to suggest a means of accomplishment. What had been thought impossible, to be capable of being achieved; so that I was enabled to acknowledge that what previously, being born of the flesh, had been living in the practice of sins, was of the earth earthly, but had now begun to be of God, and was animated by the Spirit of holiness.

"You yourself assuredly know and recollect as well as I do what was taken away from us, and what was given to us by that death of evil, and that life of virtue. You yourself know this without my information. Anything like boasting in one's own praise is hateful, although we cannot in reality boast but only be grateful for whatever we do not ascribe to man's virtue but declare to be the gift of God; so that now we do not sin is the beginning of the work of faith, whereas that we sinned before was the result of human error. All our power is of God; I say, of God. From Him we have life, from Him we have strength, by power derived and conceived from Him we do. While yet in this world, we foreknow the indications of things to come."