Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 145
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein. (7-12)
With this stanza reminding the reader of what Christ agonised over in ‘The Sacrifice’ and
beginning to hint at the correlation between the agony and the Eucharist, Herbert makes it
explicit:
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine. (13-18)
It is here again that a dialectic is used as a way to describe God’s relationship to humanity
through the work of the Incarnation and Passion, in that ‘Both sin and love are defined by
the blood of Christ’. 38
Believers are ‘Sinne’, or at least the reason for it, and they are the
wine press, the torturers that force out the ‘bloud’, but God, Jesus, is the ‘Love’. Although
believers must lament his death and agony, they must also love and enjoy his gift of his
‘bloud’ that they get to pleasantly and intoxicatingly enjoy as wine, or as A. J. Smith
states, ‘As Christ’s agony is the immediate embodiment of the spiritual condition of sin so
38 Reformation Spirituality, p. 68.