H. Clay Trumbull

“ Having caused us to sit fronting each other on a straw-carpet, he made an incision in each of our right legs, from which he extracted blood, and inter-changing it, he exclaimed aloud: ‘If either of you break this brotherhood now established between you, may the lion devour him, the serpent poison him, bitterness be in his food, his friends desert him, his gun burst in his hands and wound him, and everything that is bad do wrong to him until death.’” [29] The same blood now flowed in the veins of both Stanley and Mirambo. They were friends and brothers in a sacred covenant; life for life. ”

“ A covenant of blood, a covenant made by the inter-commingling of blood, has been recognized as the closest, the holiest, and the most indissoluble, compact conceivable. Such a covenant clearly involves an absolute surrender of one’s separate self, and an irrevocable merging of one’s individual nature into the dual, or the multiplied, personality included in the compact. Man’s highest and noblest outreachings of soul have, therefore, been for such a union with the divine nature, as is typified in this human covenant of blood. ”

“ Again, we are liable to think of the surrender of a life, as the dooming to death; and of a sacrificial outpouring of blood, as necessarily an expiatory offering. In the case of the only son sent into battle by his patriotic father, death may be an incident to the transaction; but the gift of the son is the gift of his life, whether he shall live or die. ”

“ Man as he is needs a “new heart,” a new nature, a new life; and that need can be supplied by the Author of life, through that regeneration which is indicated, and which, in a sense, is realized in new blood which is pure at the start, and which purifies by its purging inflow. The recognition of this truth, and the outreaching of man in its direction, are at the basis of all forms of sacrifice in all the ages. And this wonderful attainment of primitive man everywhere, we are asked to accept as man’s mere natural inheritance from the sensory quiverings of his ancestral tadpole! ”

“ Under the Mosaic ritual, the forms and the symbolisms of sacrifice were various. But through them all, where blood was an element,—in the sin-offering, in the trespass-offering, in the burnt-offering, in the peace-offering,—blood always represented life, never death. Death was essential to its securing; but, when secured, blood was life. Death, as the inevitable wages of sin, had already passed unto all men ”

“ Here seems to be an illustration of cutting the covenant of blood-brotherhood, by sharing the life of a substitute human victim. It is much the same in the wild West as in the primitive East.
So simple a matter as the clasping of hands in token of covenant fidelity, is explicable, in its universality, only as a vestige of the primitive custom of joining pierced hands in the covenant of blood-friendship. Hand-clasping is not, by any means, a universal, nor is it even the commonest, mode of friendly and fraternal salutation among primitive peoples. ”

“ In Gethsemane, the sins and the needs of humanity so pressed upon the burdened soul of Jesus, that his very life was forced out, as it were, from his aching, breaking heart, in his boundless sympathy with his loved ones, and in his infinite longings for their union with God, through their union with himself, in the covenant of blood he was consummating in their behalf. ”

“ It would seem to be because of such cramping, that no one of the modern students of myth and folk-lore, of primitive ideas and customs, and of man’s origin and history, has brought into their true prominence, if indeed he has even noticed them in passing, the universally dominating primitive convictions: that the blood is the life; that the heart, as the blood-fountain, is the very soul of every personality; that blood-transfer is soul-transfer; that blood-sharing, human, or divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures ”

“ That a ring, or a circlet, worn around a thumb, or a finger, or an arm, in token of an endless covenant between its giver and receiver, has been looked upon, in all ages, as the symbol of an inter-union of the lives thereby brought together, is unmistakable; whether the covenanting life-blood be drawn for such inter-commingling, directly from the member so encircled, or not. The very covenant itself, or its binding force, has been sometimes thought to depend on the circlet representing it; as if the life which was pledged passed into the token of its pledging. ”

“ Blood—even the blood of beasts—thus made sacred, as a holy symbol, must never be counted as a common thing; but it must be held, ever reverently, as a token of that life which is the sinner’s need; and which is God’s grandest gift and God’s highest prerogative. ”

“ In India, as elsewhere throughout the East, the desire of every parent to have a son is very strong. A son is longed for, to inherit the parental name and possessions, to perform the funeral rites and the annual ceremonies in honor of his parents; and, indeed, “it is said in the Dattaka-Mimansa, ‘Heaven awaits not one who is destitute of a son.’” When, therefore, parents have not a son of their own, they often formally adopt one; and, in this ceremony, saffron-water seems to [195] take the place of blood, in the sacred and indissoluble covenant of transfer. ”

“ In process of time, the hour drew nigh that the true covenant of blood between God and man should be consummated finally, in its perfectness. The period chosen was the passover-feast—the feast observed by the Jews in commemoration of that blood-covenanting occasion in Egypt, when God evidenced anew his fidelity to his promises to the seed of Abraham, his blood-covenanted friend. ”

“ And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it: and at the hand of man, even at the hand of every man’s brother, will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. ”

“ Then it was, while they were there together in that upper room, for the consummating of that blood-covenant of friendship, that Jesus said to his disciples: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. ”

“ He says: “By absorbing each other’s blood, men are supposed to establish actual community of nature. Similarly with the ceremony of exchanging names.... This, which is a widely-diffused practice, arises from the belief that the name is vitally connected with its owner.... To exchange names, therefore, is to establish some participation in one another’s being.” [747] Hence, as we may suppose, came the well-nigh universal Oriental practice of inter-weaving the name of one’s Deity with one’s name, as a symbolic evidence of one’s covenant-union with the Deity. ”

“ Moreover, the life, which is represented by the blood and by the heart, appears to be counted peculiarly the gift and the guarded treasure of Deity, and as being in itself a resemblance to, if not actually a part of, the divine nature. ”

“ But this is, if it were possible, only a more unselfish and a more trustful mode than the other, of covenanting by blood; of pledging the life, by pledging the blood, to one who is already trusted absolutely. And this mode of proffering the covenant of blood, or of pledging one’s self in devotedness by the giving of one’s blood, is still a custom in the East; as it has been in both the East and the West, from time immemorial. ”

“ In India, as in China, human sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of the first-born son, were formerly made freely, as a means of bringing the offerer into closer relations with the gods, through the outpoured blood. ”

“ The people then came forward, and made obeisance to the missionaries, as the friends of the Dayak King, crying out with loud voices, ‘Let us be friends and brethren forever; and may God help the Dayaks to obtain the knowledge of God from the missionaries!’ The two chiefs then said, ‘Brethren, be not afraid to dwell with us; for we will do you no harm; and if others wish to hurt you, we will defend you with our life’s blood, and die ourselves ere you be slain. ”

“ O this miserable fowl weltering in its blood!—thy liver do we [47] eat, thy liver do we eat. And should either of us retract from the terms of this oath, let him instantly become a fool, let him instantly become blind, let this covenant prove a curse to him: let him not be a human being: let there be no heir to inherit after him, but let him be reduced, and float with the water never to see its source; let him never obtain; what is out of doors, may it never enter ”

“ Because of his God-ward purpose of bringing men into a loving covenant with God, Jesus gave of his blood in the covenant-rite of circumcision. Because of his man-ward sympathy with the needs and the trials of those whom he had come to save, and because of the crushing burden of their death-bringing sins, Jesus gave of his blood in an agony of intercessory suffering. ”

“ Having, therefore, brethren, boldness [the right of boldness] to enter into the Holy Place [the Holy of Holies] by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say his flesh; and having a Great Priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our body washed, with pure water [there being no longer need of blood-sprinkling or blood-laving, to those who are sharers of the divine nature—the divine blood] . ”

“ He perceives that the primitive offerings of blood over the dead, from the living person, are, in some cases, “explicable as arising 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 [and of course, the principle is the same when the offering of blood is to the gods, thereby] effect with it a union, which on the one side implies submission, and on the other side friendliness.” ”

“ For Abraham to have surrendered his own toil-worn life, now that a son of promise was born to him, would have been a minor matter, at the call of God. But for Abraham to surrender that son, and so to become again a childless, hopeless old man, was a very different matter. Only a faith that would neither question nor reason, only a love that would neither fail nor waver, could meet an issue like that. The surrender of an only son by an Oriental, was not, therefore, as it is often deemed in the Western mind, a father’s selfish yielding of a lesser substitute for himself ”

“ But, where men yielded up unauthorized offerings, even of their own blood, or of the very lives of their first-born, they confessed themselves unsatisfied with their attitude God-ward; and, where men followed a divinely prescribed ritual, they were taught by that very ritual itself, that the outpoured blood and the partaken flesh of the sacrifices were, at the best, but mere shadows of good things to come. ”

“ The whole burnt-offering, of the Mosaic ritual, symbolised the entire surrender to God, of the individual or of the congregation, in covenant faithfulness; the giving of one’s self in unreserved trust to Him [249] with whom the offerer desired to be in loving oneness. It was an indication of a readiness to enter fully into that inter-union, which the blood-covenant brought about between two who had been separated, but who were henceforth to be as one. This offering also must be made with blood; for it is blood—which is the life—that gives the possibility of inter-union. ”

“ So, the long symbolized covenant of blood was made a reality. “And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.” [639]
10. THE BLOOD COVENANT APPLIED. Under the symbolic sacrifices of the Old Covenant, it was the blood which made atonement for the soul. It was not the death of the victim, nor yet its broken body, but it was the blood, the life, the soul, that was [287] made the means of a soul’s ransom, of its rescue, of its redemption. ”