But before rolling up the book it came into my mind that Paul said somewhere to the Romans “I beseech you therefore by the compassionate mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.” Having found these words and read them carefully over, I thought that the writer must have had in view some allusion to the sacrifice of Isaac. For that was the only “living sacrifice” that I could find (and indeed it is the only one) mentioned in scripture. Then I turned to the first book of the Law and there I found that God’s promise of Isaac to Abraham had been called a covenant, and this, said Paul to the Galatians, was, so to speak, the real thought of God. The covenant of Sinai was only an afterthought. The sign of Abraham’s covenant by promise was in the blood of c
