Writing of Jesus Christ, Justin comments thus on the words written by Moses as prophesied by the patriarch Jacob: “He shall wash his garments with wine, and his vesture with the blood of the grape.” This signified that “He (Jesus Christ) would wash those who believe in Him with His own blood.”--_Dial. with Trypho_, liv. “If, then, the Father of all wished His Christ to take upon Him the curses of all, knowing that after He had been crucified and was dead, He would raise Him up”.... “For although His Father caused Him to suffer these things in behalf of the human family”.... “If His Father wished Him to suffer thus in order that by His stripes the human race might be healed.”--_Dial. with Trypho_, xcv. “And as the blood of the Passover saved those who were in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver from death those who have believed.”--_Dial. with Trypho_, cxi. In well-nigh all these reliquiæ of the earliest Christian teaching, copious use was made of that wonderful 53rd chapter of Isaiah, in which the Hebrew seer sketched with a startling accuracy of detail some of the leading features of the awful drama of the Divine Atonement for all sin.[61] The scene of this drama was the storied Holy City, and the One who made the great Atonement was He who on earth was known as Jesus Christ and in heaven as the Son of God. The above “Catena Aurea” (golden chain) of passages is taken from the works we possess of the earliest teachers of Christianity who wrote in the fifty years immediately following the passing of S. John the beloved apostle, and they tell us exactly what was _the_ doctrine pressed home to the Brotherhood in the early assemblies of Christians of which we are here speaking. There were other dogmas, no doubt, included in the teaching of these early assemblies and meetings, such as the resurrection of the flesh; the great reckoning before the Judge, at which even the just would tremble were it not that the Judge was at the same time their Redeemer and loving Friend. The unspeakable joys of Paradise, the garden of their God and Saviour, were constantly dwelt upon, and the good glad tidings would fall like dew from heaven upon the world-weary, sad-eyed listeners. But the great doctrine of the “Atonement,” at once simple and sublime, so repeatedly pressed home in the above-quoted words of the earliest teachers, was no doubt the strongest inducement which drew the Christian folk to meet often together--was _the_ link which bound them into one brotherhood, and knit them at the same time to the loving Master.