Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/143

 with them, he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promised Comforter from the Father, of which he had so often spoken to them. "For John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence." Herein he expressed a beautiful figure, powerfully impressive to them, though to most common perceptions perhaps, not so obvious. In the beginning of those bright revelations of the truth which had been made to that age, John, the herald and precursor of a greater preacher, had made a bold, rough outset in the great work of evangelization. The simple, striking truths which he brought forward, were forcibly expressed in the ceremony which he introduced as the sign of conversion; as the defilements of the body were washed away in the water, so were the deeper pollutions of the soul removed by the inward cleansing effected by the change which followed the full knowledge and feeling of the truth. The gross and tangible liquid which he made the sign of conversion, was also an emblem of the rude and palpable character of the truths which he preached; so too, the final token which the apostles of Jesus, when at last perfectly taught and equipped, should receive as the consecrated and regenerated leaders of the gospel host, was revealed in a form and in a substance as uncontrollably and incalculably above the heavy water, as their knowledge, and faith, and hope were greater than the dim foreshadowing given by the baptist, of good things to come. Water is a heavy fluid, capable of being seen, touched, tasted, weighed and poured; it has all the grosser and more palpable properties of matter. But the air is, even to us, and seemed more particularly to the ancients, beyond the apprehension of most of the senses, by which the properties of bodies are made known to man. We cannot see it, or at least are not commonly conscious of its visibility; yet we feel its power to terrify, and to comfort, and see the evidences of its might in the ruins of many of the works of man and of nature, which oppose its movements. The sources of its power too, seem to a common eye, to be within itself, and when it rises in storms and whirlwind, its motions seem like the capricious volitions of a sentient principle within it. But water, whenever it moves, seems only the inanimate mass which other agents put in motion. The awful dash of the cataract is but the continued fall of a heavy body impelled by gravity, and even "when the myriad voices of ocean roar," the mighty cause of the storm is the unseen power of the air, which shows its superiority in the scale of sub