As John Henry Newman says: 'Friends do not ask for literal commands, but from their knowledge of the speaker they understand his half-words, and from love to him they anticipate his wishes.' Here is not even the reverend 'half-word,' it is his last command that all believing men should be baptized upon their faith. As the Captain of salvation he gave this military mandate, 'Follow me!' and made the law doubly positive by his own example. It was this simple, heart-felt sincerity in obeying him which led a noted saint to say: 'Wherever I have seen the print of his shoe on earth, there I have coveted to set my foot, too.' The Apostolic Churches associated those primal exercises of the heart—repentance, forgiveness of sin, and regeneration of soul—with baptism; these were the preparation for baptism, which exhibited the new religious state into which their members were brought. Hence, says Dr. Jacob: 'It was evident from the first that Christian baptism, though in its outward form one single act, represented no single, isolated state of feeling—but a spiritual transaction carried on in the spirit and conscience, and then declaring itself externally. . . . Consequently, the fact that persons had been baptized is in the New Testament often referred to, both as indicating their privileged position, and as reminding them of their serious obligation to live in a manner not unworthy of it.'11 This exactly accords with the inspired teaching. 'Through
grace ye are all the children of God, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ, put on Christ.' Gal. iii, 27. 'Buried with him in your baptism in which ye were also raised up with him,
through faith in the operation of God.' Col. ii, 12. Men who professed faith and were baptized were regarded by those Churches as true believers, until their conduct proved the contrary. Peter teaches the same doctrine when he says that 'baptism is not the putting away of the filth of the flesh,' the mere cleansing of the body; it goes deeper and signifies the inward state of the baptized, which must correspond with the outward appearance; by 'the answer of a good conscience toward God.' What a terrible rebuke is this to the ignorant notion that if your own conscience approves of your baptism, you have all the baptism that you need. No, the Apostle insists that the purity of your conscience as a saved man must correspond to the profession which you make when you are buried with Christ in baptism. Thus, Jerome understood the New Testament, and says: 'First they taught all nations, then immerse those that are taught, in water; for it cannot be that the body should receive the sacrament of baptism unless the soul has before received the truth of faith.'
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