Every birth, I say, implies a previous burial. This is true of time in its relations to eternity. Coming into this life involves departure out of a previous life, and burial in this life implies birth into the next. The sun, setting upon the western hemisphere, rises upon the eastern; and sets upon the eastern to rise upon the western. The setting and rising of the sun; sleep followed by waking; winter with its icy fetters and shroud of snow, succeeded by spring in garments of green, with its bright flowers, singing birds, and laughing streams; all these suggest burial, and resurrection—and consequently baptism.
Born of God.—To be "born of God" literally means to come forth from God. "Born of woman" has a like significance. We have a Father and a Mother in heaven, in whose image man was created, male and female. We came forth from them—were begotten and born of them in the spirit, as much so as we were afterwards begotten and born in the flesh; and we must be begotten and born again, in the similitude of those other begettings and births, or we cannot regain the presence of our eternal Father and Mother.
"Children of My Begetting."—Baptism signifies the creation of souls for the kingdom of God. The priest who immerses, or the elder who confirms, is the spiritual progenitor of the person baptized. "Children of my begetting," Paul terms those receiving the gospel through his instrumentality. To baptize is to perform, in a spiritual way, the functions of fatherhood. Motherhood is the sacred symbol of the baptismal font. Hence, baptism must be by divine authority—must have the sanction of heaven upon it. There must first be a marriage, a union between heavenly powers and earthly agents; otherwise the baptism will be unlawful, the birth illegitimate, the act of begetting a crime! Baptisms, like marriages, performed without divine authority, will have no effect when men are dead.
Suggestive Symbolism.—The significance of baptism is suggested by the very career of that Divine Being whose descent from heaven to earth, and whose ascent from earth into heaven, is the sum and substance of the Gospel story. His experience from the time he left his celestial throne, to the time he returned thither, was it not a descending below, and a rising above, all things? Did he not lay down his life and take it up again, as the Father had done before him? Is it not just possible that baptism was instituted to symbolize this mighty birth, this mortal burial, with its immortal resurrection?
When the Gods sat in council to consider the creation and redemption of this planet, what was their great thought and the theme of their deliberations? Was it not a going down and a coming back—not only on their part, for creative and redemptive purposes, but also on the part of their offspring, for purposes of experience and progression? What wonder, then, if in the gospel plan, whereby the spirits of men and women might accomplish this foreordained descent into, and ascent out of, the world, there should be an ordinance symbolical of the vast vicissitude?
Moreover, in the symbolism of the scriptures this world is represented by water. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Here, at the very dawn of creation, are the two principles or elements—spirit and water—with which baptisms are performed—one creative, the other creatable; one representing heaven, the other, earth. Note the reference in Daniel (7) to beasts, representing earthly governments, coming up from the sea. Note the Savior's parable, likening the kingdom of heaven to a net cast into the sea; the sea symbolizing the world, the fishes, the souls drawn out of the world. Note also Revelation (13) where a beast representing anti-Christ, rises out of the sea: and (17) where a woman, the Mother of Harlots, representing a great city reigning over the kings of the earth, is described as "sitting upon many waters"—the waters signifying "peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues."
Much of the body of this world—the physical frame of a spiritual creation—is water, even parts of it that seem solid. Science so affirms, and who can gainsay it? Walt Whitman, that eccentric poetic genius, speaks of "the slumbering and liquid trees." Thales, the founder of Greek philosophy, started out with the proposition: "All things are water." He ascribed to water the powers of creation, supposing that he had found in it the primal element, or great first cause. He omitted the real creative principle—the Spirit of God, which in the beginning "moved upon the face of the waters," or as Milton says, "dove-like sat brooding on the vast abyss." Thales being a physicist, took no account of the spiritual. Geology asserts that the earth was once submerged in water. The scriptures also declare it, and without reference to the deluge. "Let the dry land appear!"—the very words suggest baptism, birth, creation—the emergence of a primitive planet from the womb of the waters. Water, symbolically if not literally, represents the temporal part of creation, including the body or mortal part of man.
Is not baptism, therefore, in its two-fold character and significance, suggestive of the soul's passing out from this watery world, into the spirit world, and thence, by resurrection, into eternal glory? It is only a suggestion, but it seems to emphasize, for me, the reason why the doorway to the Church and Kingdom of God is a double doorway, a dual birth, a baptism of Water and of the Spirit?