Before primitive man could have concerned himself seriously with the course of the heavenly bodies, or the changes of the seasons, or the points of compass and the correspondent shifting of the winds, he must have recognized the sacred mystery of life and its transmission. It would seem that a covenant involved in the union of twain made one over outpoured blood, with power from the Author of life for the transmission of life, must have been the primal religious rite that brought man’s personal action into the clear light of a covenant relation with his Creator. Every subsequent development of the religious idea, good and bad, pure and impure, would seem to be traceable as an outgrowth, or as a perversion, of this elemental religious rite.
It would seem clear that the primal idea of a covenant union between two persons, and between those persons and their God, was found in the initial and primitive rite of marriage, with its outpoured blood, or gift of life, on the threshold of being; and that this rite contained in itself the germs of covenanting and of sacrifice, and the idea of an altar and a sacrament, where, and by which, man and God were brought into loving communion and union. Thus the beginning of religious rites was found in the primal Threshold Covenant as here portrayed.
Out of this beginning came all that is best and holiest in the thought of sacrifice and sacrament and spiritual communion. The very highest development of religious truth, under the guidance of progressive revelation from God, and of man’s growth in thought and knowledge with the passing ages, is directly in the line of this simple and germinal idea. Both the Bible record and the record of outside history tend to confirm this view of religious rites in their beginning and progress.
New life as a consequence of blood, or life, surrendered in holy covenanting, is a natural inference or outgrowth of the truth of the primal Threshold Covenant. Thus the thought of life after death, in the resurrection or in metempsychosis, comes with the recognition of the simple fact of the results of covenant union in the sight, and with the blessing, of the Author of life, in the rite of the Threshold Covenant.[599]