Can such a glaring contradiction be attributed to Paul? It could probably be attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. But can it be attributed to Paul? The writer of the Pauline Epistles was no mere compiler, receiving unassimilated materials from many sources. He was a person of highly marked characteristics. And he was a person of commanding intellect. Could such a writer have introduced a glaring contradiction into the very center of his teaching? Could a writer who in the great mass of his writing is triumphantly and even polemically anti-sacramentarian have maintained all along a crassly sacramentarian view of the way in which religious blessing was to be obtained? An affirmative answer to these questions could be rendered only on the basis of positive evidence of the most unequivocal kind. And such positive evidence is not forthcoming. The most that can by any possibility be said for the strictly sacramentarian interpretation of Rom. vi is that it is possible. It might conceivably be adopted if Rom. vi stood alone. But as a matter of fact Rom. vi does not stand alone; it stands in the midst of a considerable body of Pauline Epistles. And it must be interpreted in the light of what Paul says elsewhere. If Rom. vi stood absolutely alone, Paul might conceivably be thought to mean that the act of baptism in itself involves a dying with Christ and a rising with Him to a new life. But the whole character of the Pauline Epistles absolutely precludes such an interpretation. And another interpretation does full justice to the words as they stand. That interpretation is the obvious one which makes the act of baptism an outward sign of an inner experience. "We were buried with him," says Paul, "through baptism unto death." These words are pressed by the modern school of comparative religion very much as Luther at the Marburg Conference pressed the Latin words of institution of the Lord's Supper. Luther wrote on the table, "This is my body" ("hoc est corpus meum"), and would not hear of anything but the most literal interpretation of the words. So the modern school of comparative religion presses the words "through baptism" in Rom. vi. 4. "We were buried with him through baptism," says Paul. Therefore, it is said, since it was through baptism, it was not through faith, or through any inner disposition of the soul; therefore the sacramentarian interpretation is correct. But if Luther's over-literalness, fraught with such disastrous consequences for the Church, is deserted by most advocates of the grammatico-historical method of exegesis, should an equally bald literalness be insisted upon in connection with Rom. vi. 4?