Page:What Is The True Christian Religion?.pdf/36

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applied by using the word "blood" instead of its spiritual equivalent of Divine truth.

A preacher called one day upon the writer to find out just what I did believe about salvation. He stayed two hours and a half and I explained simply my beliefs and felt that he had been impressed by the reasonableness of what I said and its strict adherence to Scripture. He told me of his experiences in finding his present religion and I found him to be apparently a very sincere Christian. Again he came to see me in the evening and stayed three hours, bringing with him a long letter of three closely typed legal size sheets filled with quotations from the Bible emphasizing the use of the word "blood." He had evidently spent the entire afternoon following his first visit writing the letter to convince me that I had gone astray.

I told him that if he would only think at what the word "blood" signified, namely, the Divine truth, and since the Divine truth is the expression of the Divine Life, and hence may be thought of as Divine Life itself, for "the life is in the blood," he would have a clearer understanding of the passages he quoted. I showed him that a soldier is said to have shed his blood for his country when it was meant that he had poured out his life for it, that we should drink of the reality of the life of Jesus in our souls as saving us rather than hold on to the symbol of the blood. When Jesus died on the cross, shedding His blood for us it evidently meant that He poured out His life for us in His temptation combats against the hells as our champion. We are saved by His life as it finds expression in our life.

He seemed to agree with me, but the next morning he came again and urged me to give up human interpretation of the Bible, saying that I should accept the Bible as it is. I told him that there are almost as many interpretations of the Bible text as there are men. And he handed me, strangely inconsistent, a diagram which showed that there are seven steps in man's salvation based upon the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, an obviously new and man-made interpretation of Bible symbols. He Wanted me to accept his interpretation of the Bible! I told him that I believed in reality and he merely in the symbol. He admitted that the "blood" did signify the life but insisted