LX. To this they add, that as we err by following a wrong construction of the place before alleged, so our second oversight is, that we thereupon infer a necessity over rigorous and extreme1.
The true necessity of baptism a few propositions considered will soon decide. All things which either are known causes or set means2, whereby any great good is usually procured, or men delivered from grievous evil, the same we must needs confess necessary. And, if regeneration were not in this very sense a thing necessary to eternal life, would Christ himself have taught Nicodemus3 that to see the kingdom of God is impossible, saving only for those men which are born from above?
His words following in the next sentence are a proof sufficient, that to our regeneration his Spirit is no less necessary than regeneration itself necessary unto life4.
Thirdly, unless as the Spirit is a necessary inward cause, so Water were a necessary outward mean to our regeneration, what construction should we give unto those words wherein we are said to be new-born, and that ἐξ ὕδατος, even of water? Why are we taught that with water God doth purify and cleanse his Church5? Wherefore do the Apostles of Christ term baptism a bath of regeneration6? What purpose had they in giving men advice to receive outward baptism, and in persuading them it did avail to remission of sins7?
If outward baptism were a cause in itself possessed of that power either natural or supernatural, without the present operation whereof no such effect could possibly grow, it must then follow, that seeing effects do never prevent the necessary causes out of which they spring, no man could ever receive grace before baptism: which being apparently both known and also confessed to be otherwise in many particulars, although in the rest we make not baptism a cause of grace, yet the grace which is given them with their baptism8 doth so far forth depend on the very outward sacrament, that God will have it embraced not only as a sign or token what we receive, but also as an instrument or mean whereby we receive grace, because baptism is a sacrament which God hath instituted in his Church, to the end that they which receive the same might thereby be incorporated into Christ9, and so through his most precious merit obtain as well that saving grace of imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness10, as also that infused divine virtue of the Holy Ghost11, which giveth to the powers of the soul their first disposition towards future newness of life.
There are that elevate too much the ordinary and immediate means of life, relying wholly upon the bare conceit of that eternal election, which notwithstanding includeth a subordination of means without which we are not actually brought to enjoy what God secretly did intend; and therefore to build upon God’s election if we keep not ourselves to the ways which he hath appointed for men to walk in, is but a self-deceiving vanity. When the Apostle saw men called to the participation of Jesus Christ, after the Gospel of God embraced and the sacrament of life received, he feareth not then to put them in the number of elect saints12, he then accounteth them delivered from death, and clean purged from all sin13. Till then notwithstanding their pre-ordination unto life which none could know of saving God, what were they in the Apostle’s own account but children of wrath as well as others, plain aliens altogether without hope, strangers utterly without God in this present world14? So that by sacraments and other sensible tokens of grace we may boldly gather that he, whose mercy vouchsafeth now to bestow the means, hath also long sithence intended us that whereunto they lead. But let us never think it safe to presume of our own last end by bare conjectural collections of his first intent and purpose, the means failing that should come between. Predestination bringeth not to life, without the grace of external vocation, wherein our baptism is implied15. For as we are not naturally men without birth, so neither are we Christian men in the eye of the Church of God but by new birth, nor according to the manifest ordinary course of divine dispensation new-born, but by that baptism which both declareth and maketh us Christians. In which respect we justly hold it to be the door of our actual entrance into God’s house, the first apparent beginning of life16, a seal perhaps to the grace of Election, before received17, but to our sanctification here a step that hath not any before it.