efforts, ‘Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter.’  Oh! you who are seeking for spiritual elevation, for intellectual enlightenment, for the fire of a noble enthusiasm, for the consecration of pure hearts, anywhere but in Christ your Lord, will you not listen to the majestic and yet lowly voice, which blends in its tones grave and loving rebuke, gentle pity, wonder and sorrow at our blindness, earnest entreaty, and divine authority—­’If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that speaketh to thee, thou wouldst have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water’?

Here are we cold, foul, dark, dead:  there is that fire of God able to cleanse, to enlighten, to give life.  How is true contact to be effected between our great need and His all-sufficient energy?  One voice brings the answer for every Christian soul, ‘I will send the Comforter.’  Brethren, let us cleave to Him, and in humble faith ask Him to plunge us into that fiery stream which, for all its fire, is yet a river of water of life proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. ’He shall baptize you in the Holy Ghost and in fire.’

III.  That fiery baptism quickens and cleanses.

In John’s mind, the difference between the two baptisms, his and the Christ’s, expresses accurately the difference between the two ministries and their effects.  As has been truly and beautifully said, he is conscious of something ‘cold and negative’ in his own teaching, of which the water of his baptism is a fit representation.  His message is divine and true, but it is hard:  ’Repent, do what you ought, wait for the Kingdom and its King.’  And, when his command has been obeyed, his disciples come up out of Jordan, at the best but superficially cleansed, and needing that the process begun in them should be perfected by mightier powers than any which his message wields.  They need more than that outward washing—­they need an inward cleansing; they need more than the preaching of repentance and morality—­they need a gift of life; they need a new power poured into their souls, the fiery steam of which, as it rolls along, like a lava current through mountain forests, shall seize and burn every growth of evil in their natures.  They need not water, but Spirit; not water, but Fire.  They need what shall be life to their truest life, and death to all the death within, that separates them from the life of God.

So the two main effects expressed here are these:  quickening and cleansing.

Fire gives warmth.  We talk about ardent desires, warm hearts, the glow of love, the fire of enthusiasm, and even the flame of life.  We draw the contrast with cold natures, which are loveless and unemotional, hard to stir and quicken; we talk about thawing reserve, about an icy torpor, and so on.  The same general strain of allusion is undoubtedly to be traced in our text.  Whatever more it means, it surely means this, that Christ comes to kindle in men’s souls a blaze of enthusiastic, divine love, such as the world never saw, and to set them aflame with fervent earnestness, which shall melt all their icy hardness of heart, and turn cold self-regard into self-forgetting consecration.