"What do you do with a passage like this in 1 Cor. 10:2?" said Mr. Sterling--"'were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.' They were all baptized, but do you see any immersion in that? It refers, you know, to the time when the Israelites passed through the sea dry shod with a cloud over them. They were baptized, but they were surely not immersed, for they would have been drowned." "I did not know of such an event," said Dorothy. "What do you mean by saying that they went through the sea dry shod?" "God banked up the waters on both sides and let them walk through untouched by the water." "Did you say the waters were banked on both sides of them and that a cloud covered them?" "Yes." "Isn't that a picture of immersion? The ground was under them, the water on both sides and the cloud covered them. It was much more like an immersion than a sprinkling." "Hold on," said Sterling. "The cloud was not over them, but back of them. The cloud was always either before or behind them, but never over them; consequently they were not covered up and the water did not even touch them--unless perhaps they were sprinkled by the spray from the wall of waters." "Let me see the passage," said Dorothy. She turned to Exodus 14:21. "But look!" she exclaimed, "it reads, 'and the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea'." "You don't think, Miss Dorothy, that they actually plunged into the middle of the sea?" asked Sterling with a smile. "Of course not, Mr. Sterling; and yet their position in that sea gave the idea to the writer of their being in the midst of the sea. To his mind it looked as if they were covered or buried in the sea, and that is immersion. The Old Testament writer calls it a baptism and the Old Testament historian speaks of them as being in the midst of the sea. Which does that look more like--sprinkling or immersion?" Sterling was getting excited. It seemed to him that Dorothy was moving further and further away from him, and he imagined he saw a chasm opening between her views and his own. But he braced himself for the struggle. To him the mode of baptism was by no means a life and death matter, but Dorothy seemed to recoil from the practice of sprinkling. Sterling cheered himself with the thought that he had certain passages to show her that would turn the tide. He said to her with a confident ring in his voice: "Miss Dorothy, I have an arrow here from the Bible quiver which I think will give the death blow to the immersion theory and prove beyond the glimmer of a doubt that pouring is the scriptural mode of baptism." "I thought you believed in sprinkling; why do you say 'pouring'?" "We make no distinction between sprinkling and pouring. They are practically the same thing. I want now to show you a statement from Christ himself indicating that he believed that pouring was the mode of baptism." "Do let us have it," said Dorothy.