illiant, 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