people from their sins--not from the punishment of their sins, that
blessed aid to repentance, but from their sins themselves, the paltry as
well as the heinous, the venial as well as the loathsome. His whole work
was and is to send away sin--to banish it from the earth, yea, to cast
it into the abyss of non-existence behind the back of God. His was the
holy war; he came carrying it into our world; he resisted unto blood;
the soldiers that followed him he taught and trained to resist also unto
blood, striving against sin; so he became the captain of their
salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered for others.
This was the task to which he was baptized; this is yet his enduring
labour. 'This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many
unto the sending away of sins.' What was the new covenant? 'I will make
a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not
according to the covenant which they brake, but this: I will put my law
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their
God, and they shall be my people.'

John baptized unto repentance because those to whom he was sent had to
repent. They must bethink themselves, and send away the sin that was in
them. But had there been a man, aware of no sin in him, but aware that
life would be no life were not sin 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