But now I felt that I had fulfilled my part as far as I possibly could, and was denied the privilege of going further by the action of the church; and that thereafter the church, and not I, was responsible for any failure on my part to go on with the work of warning sinners to "flee from the wrath to come." I was a little like Jonah fleeing to Tarshish. I was rather secretly glad I had gotten away, and shifted the responsibility somewhere else. But these impressions did not last long. My fundamental theology had not changed. The Bible was still an infallible divine revelation. Humanity was still lost, totally depraved, abiding under the "wrath of God"; hell was a reality towards which all humanity was bound; and the only means of escape was to "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ" according to the prescribed formula. The burden of my personal responsibility soon returned. I could not escape it. True, I was out of the church--the Baptist Church; but it seemed quite evident that God was using other agencies, outside the Baptist Church, for the salvation of souls, and seemed to be doing it quite successfully. If God could so use the Methodist Church for this purpose, why might not I? What did baptism amount to anyway? I was never taught that it was necessary to salvation. And if not, why make such a fuss about it? If a person was already saved, and it was only "an outward sign of an inward grace," what difference could it make how it was administered, who administered it, or whether it was administered at all? These were some of the questions that ran thru my mind. I also began to note that there were at least a few places in the New Testament that might be fairly interpreted to imply that baptism was, at least, _not always_ by immersion. For example, the baptism of so many thousands on the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, where the supply of water was very limited, and this all under the control of the enemies of the new religion. The immersion of so many, in so short a time and under such circumstances and conditions was next to a physical impossibility, while easily probable if done by sprinkling.