For if Christ, by the touch of His most innocent flesh, has hallowed all waters unto baptism, yea, and every creature besides; how much more has He, by the same contact of His most innocent flesh and blood, hallowed every form of death, all suffering and loss, every curse and shame, unto the baptism of the Spirit, or the baptism of blood![30] Even as He saith of this same baptism of His Passion, in Luke xii, "I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!" [Luke 12:50] Behold, how He is straitened, how He pants and thirsts, to sanctify suffering and death, and make them things to be loved! For He sees how we stand in fear of suffering. He marks how we tremble and shrink from death. And so, like a godly pastor or faithful physician, He hastens to set bounds to this our evil, and is impatient to die and by His contact to commend suffering and death unto us. So that the death of a Christian is henceforth to be regarded as the brazen serpent of Moses, [Num. 21:8] which indeed hath in all things the appearance of a serpent, yet is quite without life, without motion, without venom, without sting. Even so the righteous seem, in the sight of the unwise, to die; but they are in peace. We resemble them that die, nor is the outward appearance of our dying unlike that of others; but the thing itself is different, because for us death is dead. In like manner all our sufferings are like the sufferings of other men; but it is only in the appearance. In reality our sufferings are the beginning of our freedom from suffering, as our death is the beginning of our life. This is that which Christ saith in John viii, "If a man keep my saying he shall never see death." [John 8:51] How shall he not see it? Because when he dies, he begins to live, and so he cannot see death for the life that he sees. For here the night shines as the day; [Ps. 139:12] since the life that breaks upon him is brighter far than departing death. These things are assured to all who believe in Christ, to the unbelieving they are not.