The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious RitesTrumbull, H. Clay (Henry Clay)
Religion
The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious Rites
Trumbull, H. Clay (Henry Clay)
Covenants -- Religious aspects
In the Apocalypse, the inspired seer looking into the future, at the
consummation of the present age, tells of the glorious vision before
him, when Christ shall come to claim his own: “I heard as it were the
voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the
voice of mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah: for the Lord our God, the
Almighty, reigneth. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us
give the glory unto him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his
wife hath made herself ready. And it was given unto her that she should
array herself in fine linen, bright and pure: for the fine linen is the
righteous acts of the saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are
they which are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”[592]
And again he says: “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out
of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband....
And there came one of the seven angels; ... and he spake with me,
saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb.
And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and
shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,
having the glory of God: ... having a wall great and high; having twelve
gates. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God the Almighty, and
the Lamb, are the temple thereof.... And the gates thereof shall in no
wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall
bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it: and there shall in
no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination
and a lie: but only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of
life.”[593]
A closing declaration of the seer is, that the church as the Bride, with
the representative of the Bridegroom until his coming, waits and calls
for his return: “The Spirit and the bride say, Come.... Come, Lord
Jesus.”[594] And so, from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse, the
Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, recognize and emphasize the primitive
Threshold Covenant as the beginning of religious rites, and as symbolic
of the spirit of all true covenant worship.
4. SURVIVALS OF THE RITE.
Survivals of the primitive Threshold Covenant are found in various
customs among Oriental Christians, and Christians the world over. Thus
Easter is still looked at in some regions as the continuance of
Passover, and the blood on the threshold is an accompaniment of the
feast. Among the modern Greeks, each family, as a rule, buys a lamb,
kills it, and eats it on Easter Sunday. “In some country districts the
blood [of the lamb] is sometimes smeared on the threshold of the
house.”[595] Easter, like the Jewish Passover, is the threshold of the
new ecclesiastical year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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