But before rolling up the book it came into my mind that Paul said somewhere to the Romans “I beseech you therefore by the compassionate mercies of God to present your bodies a _living sacrifice_, holy, acceptable to God.” Having found these words and read them carefully over, I thought that the writer must have had in view some allusion to the sacrifice of Isaac. For that was the only “living sacrifice” that I could find (and indeed it is the only one) mentioned in scripture. Then I turned to the first book of the Law and there I found that God’s promise of Isaac to Abraham had been called a covenant, and this, said Paul to the Galatians, was, so to speak, the real _thought_ of God. The covenant of Sinai was only an afterthought. The sign of Abraham’s covenant by promise was in the blood of circumcision stamped permanently on man’s body. The sign of the covenant of Sinai was in the blood of bullocks merely sprinkled on the body. Also there was yet another covenant between God and man, earlier than both of these. This, the earliest covenant of all, was with Noah. Now the sign of this was not on man at all, but on the sky, being the rainbow. And in the covenant with Noah there was no mention of blood (either of man or beast) except this—that man was not to taste the blood of beasts when he ate their flesh, and that he was not to pour out the blood of men, much less to taste of it. Then it seemed to me that the words and thoughts of Christ, being a Jew, must be studied in the light of the words and thoughts of his countrymen the ancient Jews. The first covenant, that of Noah, said, “The blood is the life, therefore ye shall not taste of blood; and whosoever shall taste of blood, whether of man or beast, shall die; and whosoever shall pour out the blood of man, his blood shall be poured out and he shall die.” This was confirmed by the Covenant of Moses the Lawgiver. Then came a second covenant, that of the Son, saying, “I have changed all that. I am the New Covenant. The New Covenant is in my blood, that is, in my life. My blood is truly my life. Ye shall taste of my blood. It shall be poured out for all, as a living sacrifice. Whosoever shall taste of my blood shall not die but shall live for ever, even as I live.” Looking back now to that moment, I seem to perceive that I was being led on by the Spirit of God, far beyond my own natural powers of thought and reason, in order that I might have some foretaste of the revelation of the Lord’s sacrifice, so as to be strengthened and prepared for the trial that was shortly to fall upon me, when I was to be dragged away from the shore that I had just touched, back again into the tumultuous deep. For a long time I continued musing on this mystery, and turning over passage after passage in Paul’s epistles describing how believers are all one “in Christ,” and “Christ in them,” and how they are made righteous, or brought near to God, “in the blood of Christ.”