in kept out of him, that man would have
been right in receiving the baptism of John unto the continuous
dismission of the sin ever wanting to enter in at his door. The object
of the baptism was the sending away of sin; its object was repentance
only where necessary to, only as introducing, as resulting in that. He
to whom John was not sent, He whom he did not call, He who needed no
repentance, was baptized for the same object, to the same conflict for
the same end--the banishment of sin from the dominions of his
father--and that first by his own sternest repudiation of it in himself.
Thence came his victory in the wilderness: he would have his fathers
way, not his own. Could he be less fitted to receive the baptism of
John, that the object of it was no new thing with him, who had been
about it from the beginning, yea, from all eternity? We shall be about
it, I presume, to all eternity.

Such, then, as were baptized by John, were initiated into the company of
those whose work was to send sin out of the world, and first, by sending
it out of themselves, by having done with it. Their earliest endeavour
in this direction would, as I have said, open the door for that help to
enter without which a man could never succeed in the divinely arduous
task--could not, because the region in which the work has to be wrought
lies in the very roots of his own being, where, knowing nothing of the
secrets of his essential existence, he can immediately do nothing, where
the maker of him alone is potent, alone is consciously present. The
change that must pass in him more than equals a new creation, inasmuch
as it is a higher creation. But its necessity is involved in the former
creation; and thence we have a right to ask help of our creator, for he
requires of us what he has created us unable to effect without him. Nay,
nay!--could we do anything without him, it were a thing to leave undone.
Blessed fact that he hath made us so near him! that the scale of our
being is so large, that we are completed only by his presence in it!
that we are not men without him! that we can be one with our
self-existent creator! that we are not cut off from the original
Infinite! that in him we must share infinitude, or be enslaved by the
finite! The very patent of our royalty is, that not for a moment can we
live our true life without the eternal life present in and with our
spirits. Without him at our unknown root, we cease to be. True, a dog
cannot live wit