Page:What Is The True Christian Religion?.pdf/51



When people read that the angels overcame the Dragon through the blood of the Lamb and through the word of their testimony, it will mean to many that we are saved by the vicarious death of Jesus on the cross and that eternal life is the result of accepting the dogma of Faith Alone, without the need, or possibility, of doing anything of good that will contribute to salvation; but the "blood of the Lamb" means here as elsewhere the Divine love or Divine truth. When one pours out his life's blood, he is pouring out his life and his life involves his love and thought—his conscious life. In the case of Jesus when he poured out his life for us He was giving that which His life represented and involved, His love and His truth.

We are saved as that Divine Love enters into our wills and as His Divine Truth teaches us the way to heaven. Is that not self-evident? We are not saved by His literal blood, as we have seen, for that was small in quantity and disappeared almost immediately.

People who believe in the Vicarious Atonement seem somehow to believe that the literal blood of Jesus cleanses us in some miraculous way. They do not appear to realize that they are thinking of the blood in a mystical way, and that they do not have the literal blood applied. If it is, as it must be, thought of as something of a spiritual nature, what is it? Is it a fanciful something, or is it something practical such as the Divine Love and the Divine Truth which actually constitute the Divine Life? And we see that as the Divine Love enters our will and as the Divine Truth enters our understanding, we become new creatures, and in no other way.

Salvation is always the life of God—His love and His truth— received by man by his free choice and permeating all his thought and life. This is the Lord's blood, and it obviously can be nothing else, since it cannot be His literal blood shed upon the cross. That never washed away sins in a literal way, nor was it offered by one Divine