“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 Chateau,
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.