points to the young Man standing by his side, and says, 'There it is
fulfilled.'

But the prophetic symbol of the Lamb, and the thought that He bore the
iniquity of the many, had their roots in the past, and pointed back to
the sacrificial lamb, the lamb of the daily sacrifice, and especially
to the lamb slain at the Passover, which was an emblem and sacrament
of deliverance from bondage. Thus the conceptions of vicarious
suffering, and of a death which is a deliverance, and of blood which,
sprinkled on the doorposts, guards the house from the destroying
angel, are all gathered into these words.

Nor do these exhaust the sources of this figure, as it comes from the
venerable and sacred past. For when we read 'the Lamb _of God_,' who
is there that does not recognise, unless his eyes are blinded by
obstinate prejudice, a glance backward to that sweet and pathetic
story when the father went up with his son to the top of Mount Moriah,
and to the boy's question, 'Where is the lamb?' answered, 'My son, God
Himself will provide the lamb!' John says, 'Behold the Lamb that God
_has_ provided, the Sacrifice, on whom is laid a world's sins, and who
bears them away.'

Note, too, the universality of the power of Christ's sacrificial work.
John does not say 'the _sins_,' as the Litany, following an imperfect
translation, makes him say. But he says, 'the _sin_ of the world,' as
if the whole mass of human transgression was bound together, in one
black and awful bundle, and laid upon the unshrinking shoulders of
this better Atlas who can bear it all, and bear it all away. Your sin,
and mine, and every man's, they were all laid upon Jesus Christ.