to die, together with
your sins, and to be made new at the Last Day, as the sacrament
declares, and as has been said.[6] This God accepts at your
hands, and grants you baptism, and from that hour begins to make
you a new man, pours into you His grace and Holy Spirit, Who
begins to slay nature and sin, and to prepare you for death and
the resurrection at the Last Day.

Again, you pledge yourself to continue in this, and more and more
to slay your sin as long as you live, even until your death. This
too God accepts, and trains and tries you all your life long,
with many good works and manifold sufferings; whereby He effects
what you in baptism have desired, viz., that you may become free
from sin, may die and rise again at the Last Day, and so fulfil
your baptism. Therefore, we read and see how bitterly He has let
His saints be tortured, and how much He has let them suffer, to
the end that they might be quickly slain, might fulfil their
baptism, die and be made new. For when this does not happen, and
we suffer not and are not tried, then the evil nature overcomes a
man, so that he makes his baptism of none effect, falls into sin,
and remains the same old man as before.

[Sidenote: God's Pledge]

X. So long, now, as you keep your pledge to God, He, in turn,
gives you His grace, and pledges Himself not to count against you
the sins which remain in your nature after baptism, and not to
regard them or to condemn you because of them. He is satisfied
and well-pleased if you are constantly striving and desiring to
slay these sins and to be rid of them by your death. For this
cause, although the evil thoughts and appetites may be at work,
nay, even although you may sin and fall at times, these sins are
already done away by the power of the sacrament and covenant, if
only you rise again and enter into the covenant, as St. Paul says
in Romans viii. No one who believes in Christ is condemned by the
evil, sinful inclination of his nature, if only he does not
follow it and consent to it; [Rom. 8:1] and St. John, in his
Epistle, writes, "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with God,
even Jesus Christ, Who has become the forgiveness of our sins."
[1 John 2:2 f.] All this takes place in baptism, where Christ is
given us, as we shall hear in the remainder of the treatise.

[Sidenote: The Comfort of the Covenant]

XI. Now if this covenant did not exist, and God were not so
merciful as to wink at our sins, there could be no sin so s