He refers to the fact that it was an old-time Jewish custom to ask pardon of a corpse for any offences committed against the living man, laying hold of the great toe of the corpse while thus asking; and if the asker had really inflicted any grievous injury on the deceased, the body was supposed to signify that fact by a copious hemorrhage from the nose.[297] “This, it will be observed,” he adds, “is almost identical with the well-known story which relates that, when Richard Cœur-de-Lion hastened to the funeral of his father, Henry II., and met the procession at Fontevraud, the blood poured from the nostrils of the dead king, whose end he had hastened by his disobedience and rebellion.” Mr. Lea shows that in some instances the bones of a murdered man are said to have given out fresh blood when handled by a murderer as long as twenty years, or even fifty, after the murder; and he gives ample evidence that a belief in this power of blood to speak for itself against the violator of God’s law, still exists among the English-speaking people, and that it has manifested itself as a means of justice-seeking, in the United States, within a few years past. 6. INTER-COMMUNION THROUGH BLOOD. Beyond the idea of inspiration through an interflow of God-representing blood, there has been in primitive man’s mind (however it came there) the thought of a possible inter-communion with God through an inter-union with God by blood. God is life. All life is from God, and belongs to God. Blood is life. Blood, therefore, as life, may be a means of man’s inter-union with God. As the closest and most sacred of covenants between man and man; as, indeed, an absolute merging of two human natures into one,--is a possibility through an inter-flowing of a common blood; so the closest and most sacred of covenants between man and God; so the inter-union of the human nature with the divine,--has been looked upon as a possibility, through the proffer and acceptance of a common life in a common blood-flow. Whatever has been man’s view of sin and its punishment, and of his separation from God because of unforgiven sin (I speak now of man as he is found, without the specific teachings of the Bible on this subject), he has counted blood--his own blood, in actuality or by substitute--a means of inter-union with God, or with the gods. Blood is not death, but life. The shedding of blood, Godward, is not the taking of life, but the giving of life. The outflowing of blood toward God is an act of gratitude or of affection, a proof of loving confidence, a means of inter-union. This seems to have been the universal primitive conception of the race. And an evidence of man’s trust in the accomplished fact of his inter-union with God, or with the gods, by blood, has been the also universal practice of man’s inter-communion with God, or with the gods, by his sharing, in food-partaking, of the body of the sacrificial offering, whose blood is the means of the divine-human inter-union.