And again he says: “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.... And there came one of the seven angels; ... and he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: ... having a wall great and high; having twelve gates. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof.... And the gates thereof shall in no wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it: and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”[593]
A closing declaration of the seer is, that the church as the Bride, with the representative of the Bridegroom until his coming, waits and calls for his return: “The Spirit and the bride say, Come.... Come, Lord Jesus.”[594] And so, from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse, the Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, recognize and emphasize the primitive Threshold Covenant as the beginning of religious rites, and as symbolic of the spirit of all true covenant worship.
Survivals of the primitive Threshold Covenant are found in various customs among Oriental Christians, and Christians the world over. Thus Easter is still looked at in some regions as the continuance of Passover, and the blood on the threshold is an accompaniment of the feast. Among the modern Greeks, each family, as a rule, buys a lamb, kills it, and eats it on Easter Sunday. “In some country districts the blood [of the lamb] is sometimes smeared on the threshold of the house.”[595] Easter, like the Jewish Passover, is the threshold of the new ecclesiastical year.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, a principal incident in the Easter festivities is the bringing down of fire from heaven at the opening of the new ecclesiastical year.[596] This ceremony seems to be a survival of the primitive custom of seeking new life, in its symbol of fire, at the threshold of the home and of the new year, in the East and in the West.[597]