CHAPTER XII
THE FAILURE OF LITERALISTS
Is this incident not an illustration of those people who reject every attempt to understand the spiritual meaning of the Bible and lose themselves in symbolism? Following such a method they can make the Bible mean anything their fancy suggests. They live in symbols and imagine themselves to be realists only. The people of the First Christian Age seem to have become largely materialists in holding on to symbols as if there were no meaning behind the symbols, as did my visitor. They speak of being washed in the blood as if it were literally applied. They sing of it in their hymns. A woman once said to me, "Perhaps you know how to argue, but I believe 'There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains!' I replied, "You object to my spiritual interpretation of the Bible, yet how much blood do you think was by Jesus at the cross? Was there enough to fill a fountain? You know at once there was not. You know perfectly well that there never was 'a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins.' You know perfectly well that in the whole history of the world there never was a sinner plunged "beneath that flood.' to 'lose his guilty stains.' You realize as I speak that the song you love is only a simile. You realize that the truth which flowed from Jesus is as a fountain in which men may bathe.—as they obey that truth, and they are cleansed from their sins as they obey.
But let us look more closley into this idea of the blood. That it is used symbolically is clearly shown when Jesus commands His disciples to eat His flesh and drink His blood. He used symbols to show them how to do this in the bread and the cup. The bread was not His flesh. The cup was not His blood. No one ever ate literally the flesh and drank the blood of Jesus. The Roman church tries to make its adherents fancy that they are actually eating the flesh of Jesus when
