There was a gleam of this, in the Canaanitish worship of Baal, in the contest between his priests and the prophet Elijah, before King Ahab, at Mount Carmel. First, those priests shed the blood of the substitute bullock, at the altar of their god, and “called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal hear us! But there was no voice, nor any that answered.” Then they grew more earnest in their supplications, and more demonstrative in their proofs of devotedness. “They leaped [or, limped] about the altar which was made.... And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lances, till the blood gushed out upon them.”[179] Similar methods of showing love for God are in vogue among the natives of Armenia, to-day. Describing a scene of worship by religious devotees in that region, Dr. Van Lennep says: “One of them cuts his forehead with a sword, so that ‘the blood gushes out.’ He wears a sheet in front, to protect his clothes, and his face is covered with clots of blood.”[180] Clearly, in this case, as in many others elsewhere, it is not as a means of self-torture, but as a proof of self-devotedness, that the blood is poured out--the life is proffered--by the devotee, toward God. Among the primitive peoples of North and of South America, it was the custom of priests and people, to draw blood from their own bodies, from their tongues, their ears, their noses, their limbs and members, when they went into their temples to worship, and to anoint with that blood the images of their gods.[181] The thorns of the maguey--a species of aloe--were, in many regions, kept ready at places of sacrifice, for convenient use in this covenant blood-letting.[182] A careful student of these early American customs has said of the obvious purpose of this yielding of one’s blood in worship, that it “might be regarded as an act of individual devotion, a gift made to the gods by the worshiper himself, out of his own very substance [of his very life, as in the blood-covenant].... The priests in particular owed it to their special character [in their covenant relation to the divinities], to draw their blood for the benefit of the gods [in renewed pledge to the gods]; and nothing could be stranger than the refined methods they adopted to accomplish this end. For instance, they would pass strings or splinters through their lips or ears, and so draw a little blood. But then a fresh string, or a fresh splinter, must be added every day, and so it might go on indefinitely; for the more there were, the more meritorious was the act;”[183] precisely as is the standard of love-showing by blood-letting among Turkish lovers and Otaheitan wives and mothers, in modern times.