So much was I in the dark that for a moment I thought of Christ as fighting at the head of an army of his countrymen and giving himself up for their sakes, like Protesilaus or the Decii; and I tried to picture Christ doing this, or something like this. But I failed. Still I was being guided rightly so far as this, that I began faintly to recognise that this “delivering over” might be not a mere propitiation of Nemesis, occurring now and then in battles, but part of the laws of the Cosmopolis, occurring often when a deliverance is to be wrought for any community of men. Of such a propitiation Protesilaus was the symbol, concerning whom Homer says, “First of the Achæans leaped he on Troy’s shore Long before all the rest.” He leaped first, in order to fall first. But his country rose by his fall. His wife sorrowed, “desolate in Thessaly,” and his house was left “half built.” But in the minds of men he abides among the firstfruits of the noble dead, who have counted it life to lay down life for others. This legend I now began to apply to spiritual things. I was being prepared to believe that the sons of God in all places and times must needs be in various ways and circumstances “delivering themselves over” as sacrifices to the will of God, in proportion to their goodness, wisdom, and strength—the good spending their life-blood for the evil, the wise for the foolish, the strong for the weak. After this, came a sentence that perplexed me greatly, “This is my body, which is in your behalf. Do this to my remembering or reminding.” Not being able to make any sense at all of this, I read on, in hope of light: “In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The word “covenant” helped me a little, because I had found Paul speaking elsewhere to the Corinthians in his own person about a “new covenant” and an “old covenant.” Also to the Galatians he mentioned “two covenants,” one of which, he said, “corresponds to Mount Sinai.” So I turned to the scripture that described how God made a “covenant” with Israel that they should obey the Law given to them from Mount Sinai. It had these words: “And Moses, having taken the blood”—that is, the blood from a “_sacrifice of salvation_” consisting of bullocks—“sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has covenanted with you concerning all these words’.” The blood of the old covenant (I perceived) was blood of “sprinkling,” purifying the body. David prayed for something more than that, when he said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” So it occurred to me that the “new covenant” was to purify, not the body but the heart and the spirit, entering into man and becoming part of him so as to cleanse him from within.