Deuteronomy 8:15

For we also are going to depart, and many are the difficulties that intervene. When we have crossed this plain, straightway the devil is upon us, doing everything, contriving every artifice, to the end that those who have been saved out of Egypt, those who have passed the Red Sea, those who are delivered at once from the evil demons, and from unnumbered plagues, may be taken and destroyed by him. But, if we be vigilant, we too have a pillar of fire, the grace of the Spirit. The same both enlightens and overshadows us. We have manna; yea rather not manna, but far more than manna. Spiritual drink we have, not water, that springs forth from the Rock. So have we too our encampment ( Rev. xx. 9 .), and we dwell in the desert even now; for a desert indeed without virtue, is the earth even now, even more desolate than that wilderness. …

He is named Christ from being as man anointed with the Holy Ghost, and called our High Priest, Apostle, Prophet and King. Long ago the divine Moses exclaimed “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet, from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me.” And the divine David cries “The Lord hath sworn and will not repent, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchisedek.” This prophecy is confirmed by the divine Apostle. And again “seeing then that we have a great High Priest that has passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.”

3. You tell me that Bonosus, like a true son of the Fish, has taken to the water. As for me who am still foul with my old stains, like the basilisk and the scorpion I haunt the dry places. Bonosus has his heel already on the serpent’s head, whilst I am still as food to the same serpent which by divine appointment devours the earth. He can scale already that ladder of which the psalms of degrees are a type; whilst I, still weeping on its first step, hardly know whether I shall ever be able to say: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Amid the threatening billows of the world he is sitting in the safe shelter of his island, that is, of the church’s pale, and it may be that even now, like John, he is being called to eat God’s book; whilst I, still lying in the sepulchre of my sins and bound with the chains of my iniquities, wait for the Lord’s command in th …

6. 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, 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. …

And that we ought not to be puffed up by victories over them he likewise charges us; saying, “Lest after thou hast eaten and art filled, hast built goodly houses and dwelt in them, and shalt have herds of oxen and flocks of sheep, and plenty of gold and of silver, and of all things, thy heart be lifted up and thou remember not the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; and was thy leader in the great and terrible wilderness.” Solomon also says in Proverbs: “When thine enemy shall fall be not glad, and in his ruin be not lifted up, lest the Lord see and it displease Him, and He turn away His wrath from him,” i.e., lest He see thy pride of heart, and cease from attacking him, and thou begin to be forsaken by Him and so once more to be troubled by that passion which by God’s grace thou hadst previously overcome. …