16, 17. Then remembered I the word … John … baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. Forasmuch then, &c.—that is, "Since God Himself has put them on a level with ourselves, by bestowing on them what the Lord Jesus pronounced the higher baptism of the Holy Ghost, would it not have been to withstand God if I had withheld from them the lower baptism of water, and kept aloof from them as still 'unclean?'"