sober-minded regarding the use of money, that we avoid the snare that could plunge us into destruction at Armageddon. Millions of people will die rich at Armageddon. No profit this! So make money your servant. Use it to honor God and to show love for neighbors by bringing them the good news of God’s kingdom. Jehovah and Christ will then be your everlasting Friends. They will not forget your loving service. For the King Christ will welcome you to the “everlasting dwelling-places” of the new world: “Come, you who have my Father’s blessing, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the world’s foundation.”—Matt. 25:34, NW.

The Meaning of John’s Baptism

“BIGGEST Mass Baptism of Modern Times.” Thus read the headlines of the Associated Press dispatch that reported on the immersion of 4,640 witnesses of Jehovah at the Riverside Cascade Pool on July 22, 1953, in connection with their international New World Society Assembly held at Yankee Stadium, New York city.

Reporting on a similar baptism, held two years before at London’s Lido Beach as part of the international Clean Worship Assembly, under the heading “Galilee Comes to the Lido,” the London Daily Herald told of 1,123 witnesses’ being immersed. Among other things its reporter was impressed by the “frightening earnestness” of the witnesses who had come to the Lido to be baptized, and, after commenting on the baptism of the men, went on to say: “Then came the women. Some women were old, many middle-aged and many young. And some of the swim-suits were as attractive as their wearers. But don’t doubt the sincerity of these people, disagree with them as you may. One crippled man with a walking stick was helped down and immersed. There was a grey-haired great-grandmother of 76, [and] an 86-year-older—a thin little wispy-haired woman.”

They manifested a “frightening earnestness,” says the reporter for the London Daily Herald; and “don’t doubt the sincerity of these people.” Yes, Jehovah’s witnesses take baptism seriously. Can it be that they take it too seriously? The reporter for another London newspaper, the Sunday Chronicle, seemed to think so, for he just could not understand why Jehovah’s witnesses insisted on total immersion, and spoke of it as a “trivial detail of a ceremony” that had become “an idée fixe in a multitude of fanatical minds.”

True, most religious organizations practice baptism of infants and that by sprinkling. Thus the New York Herald Tribune, on November 8, 1953, published a picture of a chaplain at the Bellevue Hospital, baptizing an incubator baby through the portholes of its incubator.

What is the truth about baptism? What do the Scriptures have to say about it? Is