"Without shedding of blood is no remission."--HEB. ix: 22.
John G. Whittier, the last of the great school of American poets that
made the last quarter of a century brilliant, asked me in the White
Mountains, one morning after prayers, in which I had given out
Cowper's famous hymn about "The Fountain Filled with Blood," "Do you
really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ
to the soul?" My negative reply then is my negative reply now. The
Bible statement agrees with all physicians, and all physiologists, and
all scientists, in saying that the blood is the life, and in the
Christian religion it means simply that Christ's life was given for
our life. Hence all this talk of men who say the Bible story of blood
is disgusting, and that they don't want what they call a
"slaughter-house religion," only shows their incapacity or
unwillingness to look through the figure of speech toward the thing
signified. The blood that, on the darkest Friday the world ever saw,
oozed, or trickled, or poured from the brow, and the side, and the
hands, and the feet of the illustrious sufferer, back of Jerusalem, in
a few hours coagulated and dried up, and forever disappeared; and if
man had depended on the application of the literal blood of Christ,
there would not have been a soul saved for the last eighteen
centuries.
In order to understand this red word of my text, we only have to
exercise as much common sense in religion as we do in everything else.
Pang for pang, hunger for hunger, fatigue for fatigue, tear for tear,
blood for blood, life for life, we see every day illustrated. The act
of substitution is no novelty, although I hear men talk as though the
idea of Christ's suffering substituted for our suffering were
something abnormal, something distressingly odd, something wildly
eccentric, a solitary episode in the world's history; when I could
take you out into this city, and before sundown point you to five
hundred cases of substitution and voluntary suffering of one in behalf
of another.
At two o'clock to-morrow afternoon go among the places of business or
toil. It will be no difficult thing for you to find men who, by their
looks, show you that they are overworked. They are prematurely old.
They are hastening rapidly toward their decease. They have gone
through crises in business that shattered their nervous system, and
pulled on the brain. They have a shortness of breath, and a pain in
the back of the head, and at night an insomnia that alarms them. Why
are they drudging at business early and late? For fun? No; it would be
difficult to extract any amusement out of that exhaustion. Because
they are avaricious? In many cases no. Because their own personal
expenses are lavish? No; a few hundred dollars would meet all their
wants. The simple fact is, the man is enduring all that fatigue and
exasperation, and wear and tear, to keep his home prosperous. There
is an invisible line reaching from that store, from that bank, from
that shop, from that scaffolding, to a quiet scene a few blocks, a few
miles away, and there is the secret of that business endurance. He is
simply the champion of a homestead, for which he wins bread, and
wardrobe, and education, and prosperity, and in such battle ten
thousand men fall. Of ten business men whom I bury, nine die of
overwork for others. Some sudden disease finds them with no power of
resistance, and they are gone. Life for life. Blood for blood.
Substitution!
At one o'clock to-morrow morning, the hour when slumber is most
uninterrupted and most profound, walk amid the dwelling-houses of the
city. Here and there you will find a dim light, because it is the
household custom to keep a subdued light burning: but most of the
houses from base to top are as dark as though uninhabited. A merciful
God has sent forth the archangel of sleep, and he puts his wings over
the city. But yonder is a clear light burning, and outside on the
window casement a glass or pitcher containing food for a sick child;
the food is set in the fresh air. This is the sixth night that mother
has sat up with that sufferer. She has to the last point obeyed the
physician's prescription, not giving a drop too much or too little, or
a moment too soon or too late. She is very anxious, for she has buried
three children with the same disease, and she prays and weeps, each
prayer and sob ending with a kiss of the pale cheek. By dint of
kindness she gets the little one through the ordeal. After it is all
over, the mother is taken down. Brain or nervous fever sets in, and
one day she leaves the convalescent child with a mother's blessing,
and goes up to join the three in the kingdom of heaven. Life for life.
Substitution! The fact is that there are an uncounted number of
mothers who, after they have navigated a large family of children
through all the diseases of infancy, and got them fairly started up
the flowering slope of boyhood and girlhood, have only strength enough
left to die. They fade away. Some call it consumption; some call it
nervous prostration; some call it intermittent or malarial
disposition; but I call it martyrdom of the domestic circle. Life for
life. Blood for blood. Substitution!
Or perhaps the mother lingers long enough to see a son get on the
wrong road, and his former kindness becomes rough reply when she
expresses anxiety about him. But she goes right on, looking carefully
after his apparel, remembering his every birthday with some memento,
and when he is brought home worn out with dissipation, nurses him till
he gets well and starts him again, and hopes, and expects, and prays,
and counsels, and suffers, until her strength gives out and she fails.
She is going, and attendants, bending over her pillow, ask her if she
has any message to leave, and she makes great effort to say something,
but out of three or four minutes of indistinct utterance they can
catch but three words: "My poor boy!" The simple fact is she died for
him. Life for life. Substitution!
About twenty-four years ago there went forth from our homes hundreds
of thousands of men to do battle for their country. All the poetry of
war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose. They
waded knee-deep in mud. They slept in snow-banks. They marched till
their cut feet tracked the earth. They were swindled out of their
honest rations, and lived on meat not fit for a dog. They had jaws all
fractured, and eyes extinguished, and limbs shot away. Thousands of
them cried for water as they lay dying on the field the night after
the battle, and got it not. They were homesick, and received no
message from their loved ones. They died in barns, in bushes, in
ditches, the buzzards of the summer heat the only attendants on their
obsequies. No one but the infinite God who knows everything, knows the
ten thousandth part of the length, and breadth, and depth, and height
of anguish of the Northern and Southern battlefields. Why did these
fathers leave their children and go to the front, and why did these
young men, postponing the marriage-day, start out into the
probabilities of never coming back? For the country they died. Life
for life. Blood for blood. Substitution!
But we need not go so far. What is that monument in Greenwood? It is
to the doctors who fell in the Southern epidemics. Why go? Were there
not enough sick to be attended in these Northern latitudes? Oh, yes;
but the doctor puts a few medical books in his valise, and some vials
of medicine, and leaves his patients here in the hands of other
physicians, and takes the rail-train. Before he gets to the infected
regions he passes crowded rail-trains, regular and extra, taking the
flying and affrighted populations. He arrives in a city over which a
great horror is brooding. He goes from couch to couch, feeling of
pulse and studying symptoms, and prescribing day after day, night
after night, until a fellow-physician says: "Doctor, you had better go
home and rest; you look miserable." But he can not rest while so many
are suffering. On and on, until some morning finds him in a delirium,
in which he talks of home, and then rises and says he must go and look
after those patients. He is told to lie down; but he fights his
attendants until he falls back, and is weaker and weaker, and dies for
people with whom he had no kinship, and far away from his own family,
and is hastily put away in a stranger's tomb, and only the fifth part
of a newspaper line tells us of his sacrifice--his name just mentioned
among five. Yet he has touched the furthest height of sublimity in
that three weeks of humanitarian service. He goes straight as an arrow
to the bosom of Him who said: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Life for
life. Blood for blood. Substitution!
In the legal profession I see the same principle of self-sacrifice. In
1846, William Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic negro, was at Auburn,
N.Y., on trial for murder. He had slain the entire Van Nest family.
The foaming wrath of the community could be kept off him only by armed
constables. Who would volunteer to be his counsel? No attorney wanted
to sacrifice his popularity by such an ungrateful task. All were
silent save one, a young lawyer with feeble voice, that could hardly
be heard outside the bar, pale and thin and awkward. It was William H.
Seward, who saw that the prisoner was idiotic and irresponsible, and
ought to be put in an asylum rather than put to death, the heroic
counsel uttering these beautiful words:
"I speak now in the hearing of a people who have prejudged prisoner
and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a
pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion. My child with
an affectionate smile disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever
I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give
because he says, 'God bless you!' as I pass. My dog caresses me with
fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I
fill his manger. What reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and
affection can I expect here? There the prisoner sits. Look at him.
Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill-suppressed
censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors
or my fellow-men, where, even in his heart, I can expect to find a
sentiment, a thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment, or
even of recognition? Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what
you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate before
Heaven and you, that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the
prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my
shadow falls on you instead of his own."
The gallows got its victim, but the post-mortem examination of the
poor creature showed to all the surgeons and to all the world that the
public were wrong, and William H. Seward was right, and that hard,
stony step of obloquy in the Auburn court-room was the first step of
the stairs of fame up which he went to the top, or to within one step
of the top, that last denied him through the treachery of American
politics. Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an American court-room
than William H. Seward, without reward, standing between the fury of
the populace and the loathsome imbecile. Substitution!
In the realm of the fine arts there was as remarkable an instance. A
brilliant but hypercriticised painter, Joseph William Turner, was met
by a volley of abuse from all the art galleries of Europe. His
paintings, which have since won the applause of all civilized nations,
"The Fifth Plague of Egypt," "Fishermen on a Lee Shore in Squally
Weather," "Calais Pier," "The Sun Rising Through Mist," and "Dido
Building Carthage," were then targets for critics to shoot at. In
defense of this outrageously abused man, a young author of twenty-four
years, just one year out of college, came forth with his pen, and
wrote the ablest and most famous essays on art that the world ever
saw, or ever will see--John Ruskin's "Modern Painters." For seventeen
years this author fought the battles of the maltreated artist, and
after, in poverty and broken-heartedness, the painter had died, and
the public tried to undo their cruelties toward him by giving him a
big funeral and burial at St. Paul's Cathedral, his old-time friend
took out of a tin box nineteen thousand pieces of paper containing
drawings by the old painter, and through many weary and uncompensated
months assorted and arranged them for public observation. People say
John Ruskin in his old days is cross, misanthropic, and morbid.
Whatever he may do that he ought not to do, and whatever he may say
that he ought not to say between now and his death, he will leave this
world insolvent as far as it has any capacity to pay this author's pen
for its chivalric and Christian defense of a poor painter's pencil.
John Ruskin for William Turner. Blood for blood. Substitution!
What an exalting principle this which leads one to suffer for another!
Nothing so kindles enthusiasm or awakens eloquence, or chimes poetic
canto, or moves nations. The principle is the dominant one in our
religion--Christ the Martyr, Christ the celestial Hero, Christ the
Defender, Christ the Substitute. No new principle, for it was as old
as human nature; but now on a grander, wider, higher, deeper, and more
world-resounding scale! The shepherd boy as a champion for Israel with
a sling toppled the giant of Philistine braggadocio in the dust; but
here is another David who, for all the armies of churches militant and
triumphant, hurls the Goliath of perdition into defeat, the crash of
his brazen armor like an explosion at Hell Gate. Abraham had at God's
command agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac, and the same God just in
time had provided a ram of the thicket as a substitute; but here is
another Isaac bound to the altar, and no hand arrests the sharp edges
of laceration and death, and the universe shivers and quakes and
recoils and groans at the horror.
All good men have for centuries been trying to tell whom this
Substitute was like, and every comparison, inspired and uninspired,
evangelistic, prophetic, apostolic, and human, falls short, for Christ
was the Great Unlike. Adam a type of Christ, because he came directly
from God; Noah a type of Christ, because he delivered his own family
from deluge; Melchisedec a type of Christ, because he had no
predecessor or successor; Joseph a type of Christ, because he was cast
out by his brethren; Moses a type of Christ, because he was a
deliverer from bondage; Joshua a type of Christ, because he was a
conqueror; Samson a type of Christ, because of his strength to slay
the lions and carry off the iron gates of impossibility; Solomon a
type of Christ, in the affluence of his dominion; Jonah a type of
Christ, because of the stormy sea in which he threw himself for the
rescue of others; but put together Adam and Noah and Melchisedec and
Joseph and Moses and Joshua and Samson and Solomon and Jonah, and they
would not make a fragment of a Christ, a quarter of a Christ, the half
of a Christ, or the millionth part of a Christ.
He forsook a throne and sat down on His own footstool. He came from
the top of glory to the bottom of humiliation, and changed a
circumference seraphic for a circumference diabolic. Once waited on by
angels, now hissed at by brigands. From afar and high up He came down;
past meteors swifter than they; by starry thrones, Himself more
lustrous; past larger worlds to smaller worlds; down stairs of
firmaments, and from cloud to cloud, and through tree-tops and into
the earners stall, to thrust His shoulder under our burdens and take
the lances of pain through His vitals, and wrapped himself in all the
agonies which we deserve for our misdoings, and stood on the splitting
decks of a foundering vessel, amid the drenching surf of the sea, and
passed midnights on the mountains amid wild beasts of prey, and stood
at the point where all earthly and infernal hostilities charged on Him
at once with their keen sabers--our Substitute!
When did attorney ever endure so much for a pauper client, or
physician for the patient in the lazaretto, or mother for the child in
membranous croup, as Christ for us, and Christ for you, and Christ for
me? Shall any man or woman or child in this audience who has ever
suffered for another find it hard to understand this Christly
suffering for us? Shall those whose sympathies have been wrung in
behalf of the unfortunate have no appreciation of that one moment
which was lifted out of all the ages of eternity as most conspicuous,
when Christ gathered up all the sins of those to be redeemed under His
one arm, and all their sorrows under His other arm, and said: "I will
atone for these under my right arm, and will heal all those under my
left arm. Strike me with all thy glittering shafts, O Eternal Justice!
Roll over me with all thy surges, ye oceans of sorrow"? And the
thunderbolts struck Him from above, and the seas of trouble rolled up
from beneath, hurricane after hurricane, and cyclone after cyclone,
and then and there in presence of heaven and earth and hell, yea, all
worlds witnessing, the price, the bitter price, the transcendent
price, the awful price, the glorious price, the infinite price, the
eternal price, was paid that sets us free.
That is what Paul means, that is what I mean, that is what all those
who have ever had their heart changed mean by "blood." I glory in this
religion of blood! I am thrilled as I see the suggestive color in
sacramental cup, whether it be of burnished silver set on cloth
immaculately white, or rough-hewn from wood set on table in log-hut
meeting-house of the wilderness. Now I am thrilled as I see the altars
of ancient sacrifice crimson with the blood of the slain lamb, and
Leviticus is to me not so much the Old Testament as the New. Now I see
why the destroying angel passing over Egypt in the night spared all
those houses that had blood sprinkled on their door-posts. Now I know
what Isaiah means when he speaks of "one in red apparel coming with
dyed garments from Bozrah;" and whom the Apocalypse means when it
describes a heavenly chieftain whose "vesture was dipped in blood;"
and what Peter, the apostle, means when he speaks of the "precious
blood that cleanseth from all sin;" and what the old, worn-out,
decrepit missionary Paul means when, in my text, he cries, "Without
shedding of blood is no remission." By that blood you and I will be
saved--or never saved at all. In all the ages of the world God has not
once pardoned a single sin except through the Saviour's expiation, and
He never will. Glory be to God that the hill back of Jerusalem was the
battle-field on which Christ achieved our liberty!
The most exciting and overpowering day of last summer was the day I
spent on the battle-field of Waterloo. Starting out with the morning
train from Brussels, Belgium, we arrived in about an hour on that
famous spot. A son of one who was in the battle, and who had heard
from his father a thousand times the whole scene recited, accompanied
us over the field. There stood the old Hougomont Château, the walls
dented, and scratched, and broken, and shattered by grape-shot and
cannon-ball. There is the well in which three hundred dying and dead
were pitched. There is the chapel with the head of the infant Christ
shot off. There are the gates at which, for many hours, English and
French armies wrestled. Yonder were the one hundred and sixty guns of
the English, and the two hundred and fifty guns of the French. Yonder
the Hanoverian Hussars fled for the woods. Yonder was the ravine of
Ohain, where the French cavalry, not knowing there was a hollow in the
ground, rolled over and down, troop after troop, tumbling into one
awful mass of suffering, hoof of kicking horses against brow and
breast of captains and colonels and private soldiers, the human and
the beastly groan kept up until, the day after, all was shoveled under
because of the malodor arising in that hot month of June.
"There," said our guide, "the Highland regiments lay down on their
faces waiting for the moment to spring upon the foe. In that orchard
twenty-five hundred men were cut to pieces. Here stood Wellington with
white lips, and up that knoll rode Marshal Ney on his sixth horse,
five having been shot under him. Here the ranks of the French broke,
and Marshal Ney, with his boot slashed of a sword, and his hat off,
and his face covered with powder and blood, tried to rally his troops
as he cried: 'Come and see how a marshal of French dies on the
battle-field.' From yonder direction Grouchy was expected for the
French re-enforcement, but he came not. Around those woods Blucher was
looked for to re-enforce the English, and just in time he came up.
Yonder is the field where Napoleon stood, his arm through the reins of
the horse's bridle, dazed and insane, trying to go back." Scene of a
battle that went on from twenty-five minutes to twelve o'clock, on the
eighteenth of June, until four o'clock, when the English seemed
defeated, and their commander cried out; "Boys, can you think of
giving way? Remember old England!" and the tides turned, and at eight
o'clock in the evening the man of destiny, who was called by his
troops Old Two Hundred Thousand, turned away with broken heart, and
the fate of centuries was decided.
No wonder a great mound has been reared there, hundreds of feet
high--a mound at the expense of millions of dollars and many years in
rising, and on the top is the great Belgian lion of bronze, and a
grand old lion it is. But our great Waterloo was in Palestine. There
came a day when all hell rode up, led by Apollyon, and the Captain of
our salvation confronted them alone. The Rider on the white horse of
the Apocalypse going out against the black horse cavalry of death, and
the battalions of the demoniac, and the myrmidons of darkness. From
twelve o'clock at noon to three o'clock in the afternoon the greatest
battle of the universe went on. Eternal destinies were being decided.
All the arrows of hell pierced our Chieftain, and the battle-axes
struck Him, until brow and cheek and shoulder and hand and foot were
incarnadined with oozing life; but He fought on until He gave a final
stroke with sword from Jehovah's buckler, and the commander-in-chief
of hell and all his forces fell back in everlasting ruin, and the
victory is ours. And on the mound that celebrates the triumph we plant
this day two figures, not in bronze or iron or sculptured marble, but
two figures of living light, the Lion of Judah's tribe and the Lamb
that was slain.