St. Jerome On John 3:5 & The Sacrament

St. Jerome, Letter 69, To Oceanus: “Let me now fulfil the promise I made a little while ago and with all the skill of a rhetorician sing the praises of water and of baptism. In the beginning the earth was without form and void, there was no dazzling sun or pale moon, there were no glittering stars. There was nothing but matter inorganic and invisible, and even this was lost in abysmal depths and shrouded in a distorting gloom.  The Spirit of God above moved, as a charioteer, over the face of the waters [Gen. 1:2] and produced from them the infant world, a type of the Christian child that is drawn from the laver of baptism.  A firmament is constructed between heaven and earth, and to this is allotted the name heaven — in the Hebrew Shamayim or ‘what comes out of the waters’ — and the waters which are above the heavens are parted from the others to the praise of God.  Wherefore also in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel there is seen above the cherubim a crystal stretched forth [Ezekiel 1:22], that is, the compressed and denser waters.  The first living beings come out of the waters; and believers soar out of the laver with wings to heaven… To Nicodemus He secretly says: Unless a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God… Those who have received only John’s baptism and have no knowledge of the Holy Spirit are baptized again, lest any should suppose that water unsanctified thereby could suffice for the salvation of either Jew or Gentile… Time would fail me were I to try to lay before you in order all the passages in the Holy Scriptures which relate to the efficacy of baptism or to explain the mysterious doctrine of that second birth which though it is our second is yet our first in Christ.” (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6.)