Other Innovations.--One innovation led to another. Martyrs who had shed their blood in defense of the Church, or for its sake, but had never confessed Christ nor been baptized--what of them? For their benefit another doctrine was introduced. They were held to have been baptized in their own blood. Finally, out of deference to the claims of a far more numerous class--worthy men and women, many of whom had lived and died before the Christian Church was founded, while others, though living contemporaneously with it, were never reached by its missionaries--the idea gradually obtained that baptism was not essential to salvation. All this might have been obviated, and the Church spared much ridicule and skepticism, the result of its rambling inconsistencies, had it kept the key to the situation--Baptism for the Dead. Gradual Growth of a Heresy.--The idea that baptism is non-essential did not become fixed and popular until many centuries after the Apostles "fell asleep." Saint Augustine, who figured in the latter part of the fourth and in the first half of the fifth century after Christ, and who advanced the notion that water baptism was "the outward sign of an inward grace," held, nevertheless, that no soul could be saved without it--not even infants; though their condemnation, resulting from non-baptism, would be of the mildest character. Augustine's concept of baptism, with some modifications, is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church and of the orthodox Protestant churches at the present time. Luther held baptism to be essential to salvation; Calvin and Zwingli did not; and there, in the sixteenth century, it appears, began the schism of opinion concerning it that divides Christendom today. Footnotes 1. John 3:3, 5. 2. Matt. 3:13. 3. John 5:19. 4. Mark 1:4; Acts 2:38. 5. 2 Nephi 9:21, 22. 6. John 1:29. 7. Moroni 8:8-10, 19, 22. 8. Moses 6:55. 9. D. & C. 68:25-27. 10. Mosiah 3:11; Moroni 8:22; D. & C. 45:54; Ib. 76:72. 11. I Cor. 15:29. 12. Moses 6:60. 13. 2 Kings 5:1-14. 14. James 5:14, 15. 15. Acts 2:29. 16. 1 Cor. 7:14. 17. Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16. ARTICLE THIRTY-THREE. Meaning And Mode Of Baptism. The Lesser Suggests the Greater.--When Jesus told Nicodemus that man must be born of Water and of the Spirit, he virtually declared the meaning of baptism and prescribed the mode of its administration. It was to prepare the way before a greater principle, that Christ taught and exemplified the principle of baptism. He compared it to birth, the entry into mortal life; and this pointed to resurrection, the entry into immortal glory.