XLIV.  What need have I any more of speech?  It is the time for teaching, not for controversy.  I protest before God and the elect Angels, 1 Tim. v. 21. be thou baptized in this faith.  If thy heart is written upon in some other way than as my teaching demands, come and have the writing changed; I am no unskilled caligrapher of these truths.  I write that which is written upon my own heart; and I teach that which I have been taught, and have kept from the beginning up to these hoar hairs. Supposing S. Gregory’s birth to have been in 325, the earliest date which seems at all probable, he would be under 60 in 381, when this Oration was delivered; so that the expression on the text must be held to be a rhetorical exaggeration.  Suidas, however, pushes back the date of his birth as far as 299 or 300; which does not fit in well with the chronology of his life, as given by himself.  Mine is the risk; be mine also the reward of being the Director of your soul, and consecrating you by Baptism.  But if you are already rightly disposed, and marked with the good inscription, see that you keep what is written, and remain unchanged in a changing time concerning an unchanging Thing.  Follow Pilate’s example in the better sense; you who are rightly written on, imitate him who wrote wrongfully.  Say to those who would persuade you differently, what I have written, I have written. John xix. 22.  For indeed I should be ashamed if, while that which was wrong remained inflexible, that which is right should be so easily bent aside; whereas we ought to be easily bent to that which is better from that which is worse, but immovable from the better to the worse.  If it be thus, and according to this teaching that you come to Baptism, lo I will not refrain my lips, Ps. xl. 9. lo I lend my hands to the Spirit; let us hasten your salvation.  The Spirit is eager, the Consecrator is ready, the Gift is prepared.  But if you still halt and will not receive the perfectness of the Godhead, go and look for someone else to baptize—or rather to drown you:  I have no time to cut the Godhead, and to make you dead in the moment of your regeneration, that you should have neither the Gift nor the Hope of Grace, but should in so short a time make shipwreck of your salvation.  For whatever you may subtract from the Deity of the Three, you will have overthrown the whole, and destroyed your own being made perfect.