est their pure discipline, studiest their spiritual law, thou mayest perhaps be strengthened by the spirit of life to behold the hosts. of the Most High and to live the life of the blessed in cheer, delight, and joy without end. This mayest thou attain in thine immortal soul, exalted, luminous, and clear; but not in thy mortal and perishable body, which is dark, heavy, subject to mutation and transformation. May God help thee and us and all our brethren to a right life; may he in his grace permit thee and us to reach the abodes of salvation."

BURLINGTON, VT.

Edward Hungerford.

THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST: THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE.

It is doubtful whether any incident in the history of the religious thought of the Christian Church more strikingly illustrates and confirms the declaration of the apostle, that "the letter killeth," than its interpretation of the teaching of the New Testament respecting the blood of Jesus Christ. Upon the face of it, this teaching is metaphorical. The moment we attempt to realize it materially, even in imagination, it becomes repellant. And yet from a very early age it has been literalized, and the Church has been taught that it has been saved by the physical blood of Jesus Christ, flowing from his veins and arteries, by the sanguineous fluid. To the present day it is taught by something like half of Christendom that a literal partaking of the blood of Christ is necessary, if not to salvation, at all events to any high and divine development of character: for the Roman Catholic Church holds that when the priest, properly appointed for that purpose, pronounces a benediction upon the bread and the wine before him, the bread and the wine become literally body and literally blood of Jesus Christ; and that, then, those who partake of that literal body, that flesh and that blood, are thereby sanctified and made anew. It goes further than this. It declares that in the sanctifying benediction of the priest the bread and the wine become the entire Jesus Christ. "If," say the Decrees of the Council of Trent, "any one denieth that in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist are contained truly, really and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and, consequently, the whole Christ, but saith that

he is only therein as in a sign or in figure or virtue, let him be anathema."

Nor can we Protestants inveigh against those who have literally interpreted the metaphorical teaching of the Scripture on this subject for their literalism. We do, indeed, repudiate the doctrine of transubstantiation, the notion that the bread and the wine are converted into body and blood and soul and divinity by any magic touch or priestly benediction; but still, in a great many Protestant pulpits it is taught that there is something sacred and mystical in the physical blood of Christ, and that the world is saved by the drops which fell from his hands and feet, or the larger portion which poured from his wounded side. And this notion has been wrought into hymns, and uttered in verse and in sermons and in expressions that have lost all metaphorical meaning whatever, and stand as though they represented a literal verity. It has been declared that this blood of Christ was necessary, in order that our own suffering might be intermitted. It has been declared that, because we were guilty of infinite sin, having sinned against an Infinite Being, and were therefore under an infinite condemnation, it was necessary that an infinite person should suffer physically; that Jesus Christ, an infinite person, did suffer an infinite amount of suffering in a finite quantity of time, in order that the infinite suffering might be taken off from the human race. So the love of God has been reduced to a mathematical formula.

It is not strange then, perhaps, that some religious teachers, revolting against this treatment of the teaching of the New Tesment respecting the blood of Christ, have erased that teaching from the New Testament altogether; have treated it as archaic, as belonging, at all events, to a past age, and as something to be blotted out of the consciousness of the Christian Church. Yet, if we are to erase it from the teaching of the New Testament, and if we are to blot it out of the consciousness of the Christian Church, we shall erase a great deal from the New Testament, and we shall blot out a great deal from the consciousness of the Christian Church.

The New Testament declares that we are purified by the blood of Christ; that we are washed by the blood of Christ; that we are cleansed by the blood of Christ; that we are justified by the blood of Christ; that we are redeemed by the blood of Christ; that we are brought nigh to God by the blood of Christ. It declares that by his own blood Christ entered into the holy place. It declares that by the covenant, signed by his blood, we enter into

fellowship with Him. This figure of blood is woven into the fabric of New Testament teaching, and is really more pronounced and prominent in the New Testament than in the Old.1 Moreover Christ himself has laid special prominence upon it; for He has wrought it into an object lesson to remain with the Church throughout all coming time. He has not merely said, — we might perhaps think Him misreported in that," He that does not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood has no life in him," but He has wrought this figure into a ceremonial, a sacred service, which has abode with the Church in various forms for eighteen centuries, and bids fair to abide with it as long as the Church shall stand.

What, then, is the meaning of the "blood of Christ." What does the New Testament mean by it?

I. Going back to the Old Testament, we find there the declaration that "the blood is the life." The blood of the sacrifice was the life of the sacrifice. The blood of Christ is the life of Christ. Turning from the Old Testament to other literature, we find this figure wrought into the language of all peoples, blood standing everywhere as the symbol and sign and token of that which is inmost in the person, his intrinsic and essential nature. It is difficult to say why. One might suppose that the nerves were more than the blood a representative of the man's character, that his brain was more a representative of him than his heart; but in all languages and literatures it is the heart that stands for the very essence of the man, not the brain; the blood, not the nerves. So we speak of a man as hot-blooded or cold-blooded, meaning thereby hot of temperament, or cold of temperament; so we declare that a man's blood is heated, when we mean that he is aroused, and all his powers are alive with extraordinary activity.

First of all, then, we are saved by the character, the life of Jesus Christ. The blood of Christ signifies not the drops that trickled from his back when He wrestled with agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; nor that which trickled from the hands and feet as He was nailed on the cross. It represents not what He

1 To see how much must be taken out of the New Testament if its teaching concerning "the blood" is excluded, examine the following passages. The Bible student may also be interested to apply the principles embodied in this article in the interpretation of these passages, and to test the correctness of these principles. Matt. xxvi. 28; John vi. 54–56; Rom. iii. 25; v. 9; 1 Cor. x. 16; Ephes. i. 7; ii. 13; Col. i. 20; Heb. ix. 12-14; ix. 20, 22; x. 19; xii. 24; xiii. 12; 1 Pet. i. 19; Rev. v. 19; vii. 14; xii. 11; xiii. 21; xix. 13.

did or suffered eighteen hundred years ago. It stands primarily for Christ himself in his very personality. What saves, redeems, purifies the world, is not primarily what Christ said as a teacher, nor the example He set as a man, nor even the manifestation which He made of the nature of God, but what Christ was and is in Himself, his individuality, his personality. He, the Divine One, not only living then, but through all centuries living, He is the Saviour of the world. The world is saved, not by a "plan of salvation," not by something that we think about Christ; not by something that has been taught about Christ; not even by what Christ has said about himself; not even by his own teaching; nor yet by something that He did and suffered. It is saved by Christ himself. Because in Him the blood, that is, the very heart of God, is brought in contact with the heart of man, therefore Christ is the world's Saviour.

In the desert of Africa, Livingstone, the missionary and traveler, writes in his diary these words: "What is the atonement of Christ? It is Himself. It is the inherent and everlasting mercy of God, made apparent to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was disclosed by our Lord's life and teaching. It showed that God forgives because He loves to forgive." This is the primary meaning of the blood of Christ, the meaning which lies on the very surface of the phrase.

II. But if we look at this figure of blood as we use it in common language, we shall see that there is something more in it; we shall see that it represents, not only the character and person, but that it represents a character transmittible, and a character transmitted. We speak of blooded stock, meaning thereby stock not only noble in character, but with a noble pedigree. We speak of men of noble blood, meaning thereby not only men of noble nature, but men who have inherited from fathers and mothers a noble nature. That kind of character which comes through education we call culture. That kind of character which comes as a free gift, given and almost unconsciously received, that we call blood. This may help to interpret to us the second element in the teaching of the New Testament. There is a power transmittible in God, and there is a power of reception in man. We take character as God's free gift, and He passes it over to us. The very blood of God, as it were, flows through our arteries; the very heart of God becomes itself the pulsating heart of humanity. He fills us with his own life, as though He had emptied us of our own corrupt blood and filled the arteries and the heart with a new and

diviner fluid. A father adopts a son, taking him out of the street. He surrounds him with culture and educative influences; he gives him a refined home and educated companions; he sends him to a school and college; and yet in spite of it all there crops out in the adopted one's nature now and then some grossness, some coarseness, some element that belonged to his father or his grandfather. But if the foster-father in bringing into his family this boy out of the street could bring him into the inheritance of his own qualities; if one of a long line of noble ancestry, he could transmit to him the refinement received from that ancestry; if he could pour into him courage, nobility, fidelity, the fineness, the refinement of nature, such as is the product of generations of breeding, he would do what God represents himself as doing for us. He adopts us into his household. He brings us under educative influences. He environs us with spiritual culture. He surrounds us with those who have been animated by his own spirit. But that is not all. When God adopts, He adopts not merely into the family and household of faith, but He adopts into the very generation of Divinity. We become sons of God; heirs of God; joint heirs with Christ; partakers of the divine nature. We are saved by the blood of Christ when the transmitted nature of God enters into us and becomes a part of our own nature through Jesus Christ.

mean

III. But there is still one other thought current in our thought when we use this figure in common conversation. We say the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. What do we ? We mean that the sacrifice of those who have been willing to suffer for a principle is the upbuilding of the church. Is the man who died upon the rack, and whose broken joints gave forth no drops of blood, is he not a part of the seed of the Are Cranmer and Latimer, whose bodies are burned, no part of the seed of the Church? The ashes of the martyrs are the seed of the Church as truly as the blood of the martyrs. We look back across the intervening years to the men who were willing to shed their blood for their nation's liberty; but we honor most of all the one who went through the war of the Revolution unwounded, shedding no drops of his blood. When we get away from theology, it is not blood that is precious, but that self-denial and self-sacrifice which is represented and typified by blood shed for those who have no claim except in the court of love. We are saved by the life of Christ; we are saved by the transmitted life of Christ; we are saved by that transmitted life