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Rh real Spiritual birth had taken place in Baptism, and following the hint given in St. Paul's language, some of the Fathers do not shrink from calling the restoration through the Church, by a hearty and complete repentance, "a sort of second Regeneration," or the like, which might express the greatness of the gift, without trenching upon Baptismal grace. Thus St. Chrysostom, paraphrasing the Apostle's words: "Seest thou his fatherly tenderness? seest thou a trouble worthy of an Apostle? seest thou what a bitter cry he uttereth, bitterer far than of a woman in travail? Ye have corrupted, he saith, the image; ye have lost your kindred character; ye have perverted the form (imprinted on you). Ye have need of another regeneration, and re-formation: and yet you, abortive and outcast fruit though ye be, I call children. Yet he doth not say this, but in other terms, for he spares them." And St. Jerome : "This also must be considered, that he who, through sin, had ceased after a way to be a man, through repentance is conceived again by his instructor, and it is promised that may again be formed in him. This," he adds, "against the Novatians, who deny that they whom sin has once broken in pieces, can be re-formed."

To the like effect is the glowing language of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, with respect to those, who in the heat of persecution had denied ; "through their (the martyrs') endurance, the immeasurable mercy of was displayed. For, through the living the dead were made alive; and the martyrs procured mercy for those who were no martyrs. And there was much joy in the Virgin Mother (the Church), receiving alive those whom she had cast out as dead. For through these (the martyrs), most of those who had denied were received again into the womb, and re-conceived, and re-quickened, and learned to confess; and now being alive and new braced, approached the judgment-seat: