An old fashioned Xtian sing along: Just follow the bouncing spleen

   

Are you walking daily by the Savior’s side?

   Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Do you rest each moment in the Crucified?

 Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?                                                                 “Are You Washed in the Blood?” hymn by

 Elisha A. Hoffman, pub.1878

Nothing seems to make Xtians happier or holier than invoking the gore and grotesqueness of brutal death that is a mainstay of their belief system. What the Mayans and Aztecs did in reality with human sacrifices and beating heart extractions, the Xtians do symbolically in song.

Isaac Watts, was a 18^th century writer of hymns. Many were so full of blood and gore that the Methodist Church decided to pull them from their hymnals.

Here are a few selected verses from Mr. Watts:

“Alas, and did my Savior Bleed?”
Alas, and did my Savior bleed,
And did my Sov'reign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?

Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, thine,
And bathed in its own blood,
While all exposed to wrath divine

Catchy, eh?

Here’s a lovely little ditty entitled “Blest is the Man Whose Bowels Move”

His heart contrives for their relief
More good than his own hands can do;
He, in the time of gen’ral grief,
Shall find the Lord has bowels too.

 His soul shall live secure on earth,
With secret blessings on his head,
When drought, and pestilence, and dearth
Around him multiply their dead.

Here’s a bloody one with a little anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure

“Not all the Blood of Beasts”
Not all the blood of beasts
On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace
Or wash away the stain.

 But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name
And richer blood than they.

Believing, we rejoice
To see the curse remove;
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice
And sing His bleeding love.

Watts has over two-hundred fifty hymns attributed to him, and no small portion speak of washing in the “the blest fountain of Thy blood” and other such gory references.

Other devout hymn writers penned such notable titles as “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” “Power in the Blood,” “Hide you in the Blood,” “Covered by the Blood,” “Thank God for the Blood,” and the ever popular “The Blood,” among others too numerous to mention.  Here’s the chorus from “Washed in the Blood”:

Washed in the Blood, washed in the Blood!
Washed in the Blood, in the soul-cleaning Blood.
Washed in the Blood, washed in the Blood!
Sealed in the Spirit true,
and washed in the Blood!

It’s a veritable blood bath...literally ... since having blood pouring out of Jesus’ gaping abdominal wound seems to be a popular theme.

Nowadays many churches prefer to keep the bloodiest hymns out of their mainstream hymnals.  Let’s face it, between promoting the reanimation of rotting corpses;  revering pickled pieces of saint body parts and mummified bodies under glass; images of Jesus with his heart outside his body (and oddly on fire...heartburn I imagine); drinking symbolic blood and eating symbolic flesh -  the imagery tends to make Xtianity sound suspiciously like a blood and gore death cult...which it is. Picture the Thuggee High Priest holding the beating heart of his human victim in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,”... bad press.

So singing about blood baths in church has largely gone the way of the Catholic  “Feast of the Circumcision.”  I guess it was starting to leave a bad taste in their mouth.