"Without shedding of blood is no remission,"
--Heb. ix. 22.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
Judaism was a religion of blood and thunder. The Lord God of Israel
delighted in blood. His worshippers praised him as a god of battles
and a man of war. All his favorites were men of blood. The Lord God
was likewise very fond of roast meat, and the smell thereof was a sweet
savor unto his nostrils. He had respect to Abel and his bloody offering,
but not to Cain and his vegetables. He ordered that in his holy temple
a bullock and a lamb should be killed and hacked to pieces every morning
for dinner, and a lamb for supper in the evening. To flavor the repast
he had twelve flour cakes, olive oil, salt and spice; and to wash it
down he had the fourth part of a hin of wine (over a quart) with a lamb
twice a day, the third part of a hin with a ram, and half a hin with a
bullock (Exodus xxix. 40, Numbers xv. 5-11, xxviii. 7). But his great
delight was blood, and from every victim that was slaughtered the blood
was caught by the priest in a bason and offered to him upon his altar,
which daily reeked with the sanguine stream from slaughtered animals.
The interior of his temple was like shambles, and a drain had to be made
to the brook Oedron to carry off the refuse.* Incense had to be used to
take away the smell of putrifying blood.
* Smith's Bible Dictionary, article "Blood."
[Illustration: The Altar of Jehovah.]
The most characteristic customs of the Jews, circumcision and the
Passover, alike show the sanguinary character of their deity. Because
Moses did not mutilate his child, the Lord met him at an inn and sought
to kill him (Exodus iv. 25). The Passover, according to the Jews' own
account, commemorated the Lord's slaying all the first-born of Egypt,
and sparing those of the Jews upon recognising the blood sprinkled upon
the lintels and sideposts of the doors; more probably it was a survival
of human sacrifice. God's worshippers were interdicted from tasting,
though not from shedding, the sacred fluid; yet we read of Saul's
army that "the people flew upon the spoil, and took sheep and oxen and
calves, and slew them on the ground, and the people did eat them with
the blood" (1 Sam, xiv. 32), much as the Abyssinians cut off living
steaks to this day.
Christianity is a modified gospel of gore. The great theme of the
Epistle to the Hebrews is that the blood and sacrifice of Christ is so
much better than that of animals. The substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus
Christ is the great inspiration of emotional religion. Revivalists revel
in "the blood, the precious blood":
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that thy blood was shed for me,
And that thou bidd'st me come to thee,
Oh! Lamb of God, I come, I come!
Chorus--Jesus paid it all,
All to him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain;
He washed it white as snow.
Jesus Christ says, "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
dwelleth in me, and I in him," and the most holy sacrament of the
Christian Church consists in this cannabalistic communion.
To understand this fundamental rite of communion, or, indeed, the
essence of any other part of the Christian religion, we must go back to
those savage ideas out of which it has evolved. It is easy to account
for savage superstitions in connection with blood. The life of the
savage being largely spent in warfare, either with animals or his fellow
men, the connection between blood and life is strongly impressed upon
his mind. He sees, moreover, the child formed from the mother, the flow
of whose blood is arrested. Hence the children of one mother are termed
"of the same blood." In a state of continual warfare the only safe
alliances were with those who recognised the family bond. Those who
would be friends must be sharers in the same blood. Hence we find all
oyer the savage world rites of blood-covenanting, of drinking together
from the same blood, thereby symbolising community of nature. Like
eating and drinking together, it was a sign of communion and the
substitution of bread and wine for flesh and blood is a sun-worshipping
refinement upon more primitive and cannibalistic communion.
Dr. Trumbull, in his work on _The Blood Covenant_, has given many
instances of shedding blood in celebrating covenants and "blood
brotherhood." The idea of substitution is widespread in all early
religions. One of the most curious was the sacrament of the natives of
Central America, thus noticed by Dr. Trumbull:
"Cakes of the maize sprinkled with their own blood, drawn from 'under
the girdle,' during the religions worship, were 'distributed and eaten
as blessed bread.' Moreover an image of their god, made with certain
seeds from the first fruits of their temple gardens, with a certain
gum, and with the blood of human sacrifices, were partaken of by them
reverently, under the name, 'Food of our Soul.'"
Here we have, no doubt, a link between the rude cannibal theory of
sacrifice and the Christian doctrine of communion.
Millington, in his _Testimony of the Heathen_, cites as illustration of
Exodus xxii. 8, the most telling passages from Herodotus in regard to
the Lydians and Arabians confirming alliances in this fashions. The
well-known case of Cataline and his fellow conspirators who drank from
goblets of wine mixed with blood is of course not forgotten, but Dr.
Trumbull overlooks the passage in Plutarch's "Life of Publicola," in
which he narrates that "the conspirators (against Brutus) agreed to
take a great and horrible oath, by drinking together of the blood, and
tasting the entrails of a man sacrificed for that purpose." Mr. Wake
also in his _Evolution of Morality_, has drawn attention to the
subject, and, what is more, to its important place in the history of
the evolution of society. Herbert Spencer points out in his "Ceremonial
Institutions," that blood offerings over the dead may be explained as
arising in some cases "from the practice of establishing a sacred bond
between living persons by partaking of each other's blood: the derived
conception being that those who give some of their blood to the ghost of
a man just dead and lingering near, effect with it a union which on the
one side implies submission, and on the other side, friendliness."
The widespread custom of blood-covenanting illustrates most clearly, as
Dr. Tylor points out, "the great principle of old-world morals, that man
owes friendship, not to mankind at large, but only to his own kin; so
that to entitle a stranger to kindness and good faith he must become a
kinsman by blood."* That any sane man seated at a table ever said, "Take
eat, this is my body," and "Drink, this is my blood," is ridiculous. The
bread and wine are the fruits of the the Sun. Justin Martyr, one of the
earliest of the Christian fathers, informs us that this eucharist was
partaken in the mysteries of Mithra. The Christian doctrine of partaking
of the blood of Christ is a mingling of the rites of sun-worshippers
with the early savage ceremony of the blood covenant.
* The origin of the mystery of the Rosy Gross may have been
in the savage rite of initiation by baptism with arms
outstretched in a cruciform pool of blood. See Nimrod, vol.
ii.