Survivals of the primitive Threshold Covenant are found in various
customs among Oriental Christians, and Christians the world over. Thus
Easter is still looked at in some regions as the continuance of
Passover, and the blood on the threshold is an accompaniment of the
feast. Among the modern Greeks, each family, as a rule, buys a lamb,
kills it, and eats it on Easter Sunday. “In some country districts the
blood [of the lamb] is sometimes smeared on the threshold of the
house.”[595] Easter, like the Jewish Passover, is the threshold of the
new ecclesiastical year.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, a principal incident
in the Easter festivities is the bringing down of fire from heaven at
the opening of the new ecclesiastical year.[596] This ceremony seems to
be a survival of the primitive custom of seeking new life, in its symbol
of fire, at the threshold of the home and of the new year, in the East
and in the West.[597]
In the sacredness of the rite of the primitive Threshold Covenant there
is added emphasis to the thought which causes both the Roman Catholic
Church and the Greek Church to count marriage itself a sacrament. And
thus again to the claim that a virgin who is devoted to a religious life
is a “spouse of Christ,” and that her marriage to an earthly husband is
adultery.[598] Many another religious custom points in the same
direction.
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Footnote 580:
Matt. 26 : 1–5; John 13 : 1.
Footnote 581:
Matt. 16 : 21; 26 : 17, 18; John 2 : 13; 7 : 1–9.
Footnote 582:
Matt. 26 : 17–30; Mark 14 : 12–28; Luke 22 : 7–20.
Footnote 583: