Chapter 11.—12. Of these I would ask, whether by coming to their sea they were restored to life, or whether they are still dead there?
For if still they are none the less corpses, then the laver cannot in any way profit those who are baptized by such dead men.
But if they have been restored to life, yet how can the laver profit those whom they baptized before outside, while they were
lying without life, if the passage, "He who is baptized
by the dead, of what profit is his baptism to him," is to be understood in the way in which they think? For those whom Prætextatus
and Felicianus baptized while they were yet in communion with Maximianus are now retained among them, sharing in their communion,
without being again baptized, together with the same men who baptized them—I mean Felicianus and Prætextatus: taking occasion
by which fact, if it were not that they cherish the beginning of their own obstinacy, instead of considering
the certain end of their spiritual salvation, they would certainly be bound to vigilance, and ought to recover the soundness
of their senses, so as to breathe again in Catholic peace; if only, laying aside the swelling of their pride, and overcoming
the madness of their stubbornness, they would take heed and see what monstrous sacrilege it is to curse the baptism of the
foreign churches, which we have learned from the sacred books were planted in primitive times, and to receive the baptism
of
the followers of Maximianus, whom they have condemned with their own lips.