Letters

⁷ How then can you say that all sins are drowned in the baptismal laver if a man's wife is still to swim on the surface as evidence against him? The psalmist says:— “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputes not iniquity.” It would seem that we must add something to this song and say “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes not a wife.” Let us hear also the declaration which Ezekiel the so called “son of man” makes concerning the virtue of him who is to be the true son of man, the Christian: “I will take you,” he says, “from among the heathen...then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your filthiness...a new heart also will I give you and a new spirit.” “From all your filthiness” he says, “will I cleanse you.”

If all is taken away nothing can be left. If filthiness is cleansed, how much more is cleanness kept from defilement. “A new heart also will I give you and a new spirit.” Yes, for “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything nor uncircumcision but a new nature.” Wherefore the song also which we sing is a new song, and putting off the old man we walk not in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the spirit. This is the new stone wherein the new name is written, “which no man knows saving he that receives it.” “Do you not know,” says the apostle, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Do we read so often of newness and of making new and yet can no renewing efface the stain which the word wife brings with it? We are buried with Christ by baptism and we have risen again by faith in the working of God who has called Him from the dead. And “when we were dead in our sins and in the uncircumcision of our flesh, God has quickened us together with Him, having forgiven us all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way nailing it to His cross.” Can it be that when our whole being is dead with Christ and when all the sins noted down in the old “handwriting” are blotted out, the one word “wife” alone lives on?

Time would fail me were I to try to lay before you in order all the passages in the Holy Scriptures which relate to the efficacy of baptism or to explain the mysterious doctrine of that second birth which though it is our second is yet our first in Christ.