That is what Paul means, that is what I mean, that is what all those who have ever had their heart changed mean by “blood.”  I glory in this religion of blood!  I am thrilled as I see the suggestive color in sacramental cup, whether it be of burnished silver set on cloth immaculately white, or rough-hewn from wood set on table in log-hut meeting-house of the wilderness.  Now I am thrilled as I see the altars of ancient sacrifice crimson with the blood of the slain lamb, and Leviticus is to me not so much the Old Testament as the New.  Now I see why the destroying angel passing over Egypt in the night spared all those houses that had blood sprinkled on their door-posts.  Now I know what Isaiah means when he speaks of “one in red apparel coming with dyed garments from Bozrah;” and whom the Apocalypse means when it describes a heavenly chieftain whose “vesture was dipped in blood;” and what Peter, the apostle, means when he speaks of the “precious blood that cleanseth from all sin;” and what the old, worn-out, decrepit missionary Paul means when, in my text, he cries, “Without shedding of blood is no remission.”  By that blood you and I will be saved—­or never saved at all.  In all the ages of the world God has not once pardoned a single sin except through the Saviour’s expiation, and He never will.  Glory be to God that the hill back of Jerusalem was the battle-field on which Christ achieved our liberty!

The most exciting and overpowering day of last summer was the day I spent on the battle-field of Waterloo.  Starting out with the morning train from Brussels, Belgium, we arrived in about an hour on that famous spot.  A son of one who was in the battle, and who had heard from his father a thousand times the whole scene recited, accompanied us over the field.  There stood the old Hougomont Chateau, the walls dented, and scratched, and broken, and shattered by grape-shot and cannon-ball.  There is the well in which three hundred dying and dead were pitched.  There is the chapel with the head of the infant Christ shot off.  There are the gates at which, for many hours, English and French armies wrestled.  Yonder were the one hundred and sixty guns of the English, and the two hundred and fifty guns of the French.  Yonder the Hanoverian Hussars fled for the woods.  Yonder was the ravine of Ohain, where the French cavalry, not knowing there was a hollow in the ground, rolled over and down, troop after troop, tumbling into one awful mass of suffering, hoof of kicking horses against brow and breast of captains and colonels and private soldiers, the human and the beastly groan kept up until, the day after, all was shoveled under because of the malodor arising in that hot month of June.