“That He might sanctify her, _having cleansed her_ in the laver of water by the word.” The Church’s purification is antecedent in thought to her sanctification through the sacrifice of Christ; and it is a means thereto. “Ye were washed, ye were sanctified,” writes the apostle in 1 Corinthians vi. 11, putting the two things in the same order. It is the order of doctrine which he has laid down in the epistle to the Romans, where sanctification is built on the foundation laid in justification through the blood of Christ. Through the virtue of the sacrificial death the Church in all her members was washed from the defilements of sin, that she might enter upon God’s service. Of the same initial purification of the heart St John writes in his first epistle (i. 7-9): “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.... He is faithful and just, that He should forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This is “the redemption through Christ’s blood,” for which St Paul in his first words of praise called upon us to bless God (i. 7). It is the special distinction of the New Covenant, which renders possible its other gifts of grace, that “the worshippers once cleansed” need have “no further consciousness of sins” (Heb. x. 2, 14-18). In the theological use here made of the idea of _cleansing_, St Paul comes into line with St John and the epistle to the Hebrews. The purification is nothing else than that which he has elsewhere styled _justification_. He employs the terms synonymously in the later epistle to Titus (ii. 14; iii. 7). “Having cleansed” is a phrase congruous with the figure of _the laver_, or _bath_ (comp. again Tit. iii. 5-7),--an image suggested, as one would think, by the bride-bath of the wedding-day in the ancient marriage customs. To this St Paul sees a counterpart in baptism, “the laver of water in the word.” The cleansing and withal refreshing virtues of water made it an obvious symbol of regeneration. The emblem is twofold; it pictures at once the removal of guilt, and the imparting of new strength. One goes into the bath exhausted, and covered with dust; one comes out clean and fresh. Hence the baptism of the new believer in Christ had, in St Paul’s view, a double aspect.[143] It looked backward to the old life of sin abandoned, and forward to the new life of holiness commenced. Thus it corresponded to the burial of Jesus (Rom. vi. 4), the point of juncture between death and resurrection. Baptism served as the visible and formal expression of the soul’s passage through the gate of forgiveness into the sanctified life.