[472:3] He is represented as standing, when offering up a prayer of about two hours’ length (Sec. 7), and as running with great speed (Sec. 8).  Such strength at such an age was extraordinary.  The Apostle John is said to have lived to the age of one hundred; but, towards the close of his life, he appears to have lost his wonted energy.

[472:4] “Apol.” ii.  Opera, p. 62.  See Dr Wilson’s observations on this passage in his “Infant Baptism,” pp. 447, 448.

[473:1] Dialogue with Trypho.  Opera, p. 261.

[473:2] There may here be a reference to 1 Cor. vii. 14.

[473:3] Book ii. c. xxii.  Sec. 4.

[473:4] Thus he says—­“Giving to His disciples the power of regeneration unto God, He said to them—­Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”—­Book iii. c. xvii.  Sec. 1.  Thus, too, he speaks of the heretics using certain rites “to the rejection of baptism, which is regeneration unto God.”—­Book i. c. xxi.  Sec. 1.  Irenaeus here apparently means that baptism typically is regeneration, in the same way as the bread and wine in the Eucharist are typically the body and blood of Christ.

[474:1] That infant baptism was now practised at Alexandria is apparent also from the testimony of Clemens Alexandrinus, who, in allusion to this rite, speaks of “the children that are drawn up out of the water.”—­Paedag. iii. c. 11.

[474:2] Hom. xiv. in “Lucam.”  Opera, iii. 948.  See also Opera, ii. 230.  Hom. viii. in “Leviticum.”

[474:3] Comment. in “Epist. ad Roman,” lib. v.  Opera, iv. 565.

[475:1] “De Baptismo,” c. 18.

[475:2] Acts ii. 41.

[475:3] Acts viii. 37, 38; xvi. 31-33.

[476:1] “Parents were commonly sponsors for their own children ... and the extraordinary cases in which they were presented by others, were commonly such cases, where the parent could not, or would not, do that kind office for them; as when slaves were presented to baptism by their masters, or children whose parents were dead, were brought, by the charity of any who would shew mercy on them; or children exposed by their parents, which were sometimes taken up by the holy virgins of the Church, and by them presented unto baptism.  These are the only cases mentioned by St Austin in which children seem to have had other sponsors.”—­Bingham, iii. 552.

[476:2] Mark x. 14.

[476:3] Compare Mark x. 13-16 with Luke xviii. 15, 16.

[477:1] See Acts xvi. 15.

[477:2] “De Baptismo,” c. viii. xvi.

[477:3] “It would be thought by many a cruelty to place a person without his own consent, and in unconscious infancy, in a situation, so far, much more disadvantageous than that of those brought up pagans, that if he did ever—­suppose at the age of fifteen or twenty—­fall into any sin, he must remain for the rest of his life—­perhaps for above half a century—­deprived of all hope, or at least of all confident hope, of restoration to the divine favour; shut out from all that cheering prospect which, if his baptism in infancy had been omitted, might have lain before him.”—­Archbishop Whately’s Scripture Doctrine concerning the Sacraments, p. 11, note.