This thought of the inherent worth of baptism continued to grow until by the beginning of the fifth century it became generally held that without it salvation was impossible. The Christian con- science, however, discovered a way to remove what would have been the hardest application of such a belief by what was spoken of as the baptism of blood. If an unbaptized convert was martyred for the name of Christ (as often might happen), the martyr's death was held to be itself a baptism, and this idea was extended to what was called the baptism of desire, or the baptism of faith, whenever death occurred before it was possible for a convert to be baptized. The classical instance of this, discussed by St. Augustine and frequently cited by subsequent writers, is that of the penitent thief upon the cross, [18] And Tertullian, who called baptism the "seal of faith," goes so far as to say "we do not receive the washing of purification [p.73] in order to cease from sinning, since we had already been washed in our hearts." [19] The seal of baptism was in his view the legal and visible completion of the act, not the act itself. Still, he holds baptism to be the needful "vesture of faith," as he calls it in another passage, and accordingly discusses the difficulty raised by some heretics of his own time, that Paul being the only baptized apostle, the other apostles could none of them be saved; though he does not feel it needful to adopt the explanation of certain orthodox ritualists of his day, who held, he tells us, that the apostles were possibly baptized on the occasion when the waves beat in upon them in the little ship on the sea of Galilee. It was not to be wondered at that, with such a view of baptism current in the Church, the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have laid stress rather on the numbers whom they could baptize than any other result. It is indeed at once pathetic and amusing to turn over the leaves of the letters from the missions which the good Jesuit fathers wrote two centuries and more ago, describing the progress of their work among the American Indians. You may read there the words of a missionary spending laborious days amid all manner of hardships, baptizing the sick and aged when very near to death and therefore removed from the danger of possible relapse into infidelity, and especially [p.74] rejoicing in the number of souls won by the baptism of dying infants, who could not possibly fall away from grace. To such almost ludicrous notions do men come through materialising the pictorial language of the primitive sacrament, and imagining that its visible words have magical efficacy in themselves. Yet the thought of the scene in the upper room on the night of the last supper makes us feel how much that visible language might mean in its first simplicity.