Forlong - Rivers of Life

76
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
and which so sorely tempted poor Eve to her “fall.” Under it did the Egyptian
receive his baptism of “life-giving water,” poured upon him by Netpe, she who sits
amidst the branches, with trays of fruit, and vases of the water of life, and it is the
flow of these waters says Mr. Barlow, that our early Norman Christian temples show
as falling in parallel zig-zag lines over doors and fonts, figurative of the initiatory
sacrament of the Church, its gate or door, the janua ecclesiæ. This baptismal
rite was no new thing to the Egyptian, as numerous sculptures show, but occasionally
the “water of life” is represented by “cruces ansatæ, joined together in a zig-zag manner”
(p. 61), as if this water was like that mentioned in John iv, 13, 14, different from
all ordinary water, because drawn from “a well of water springing up into everlasting
life.”
Now the first Egyptian Tree of Life was, says Barlow. quoting his authorities, the
sacred Date-Palm, or Phenix-dactylifera, of which Dr Lepsius shows us so much
worship 1600 years ago, and of which “the Spouse of the Church” says, “I will go
and take hold of the boughs thereof” (Canticles vii. 8), possibly being unaware of the
meaning of the Skandinavian tree. The second sacred tree of Egypt, the writer thinks,
was the Ficus, and we need not dispute the chronological order, but any how,
the cross was the grand idea, as Tree worship faded; and we possibly see a good picture
of the transition in that celebrated one which Barlow so well describes as in the Apsis
of St John (Ion) Lateran at Rome—a fitting place, reminding us of the holy name
IOna or Columba, which so prominently figures here. Mr Barlow says that the holy
tree is there fenced off from all mankind, on the sacred mount of the four holy streams
—the gospels of living waters. At the entrance of the enclosure an angel with drawn
sword bars the way; “behind him, in the centre of the enclosure, is, a palm tree and
on it is perched a Phenix with a glory of rays. On one side of the tree stands a
venerable old man, on the other side a younger one—
each has a glory; these figures are intended for the
Father and the Son, and the palm-tree between them
is ‘the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden.’ On
the top of the mound and planted in the fountain
of water from whence the four streams gush forth
(understood to be nations), is a lofty, articulated, and
gemmed cross, bathed in beams of light from the
radiant body of a dove—the Holy Ghost—hovering
over it” (Barlow, p. 72). Let us here try to get a
very distinct idea as to what we have arrived at, for
the change of faith is now clear and sharp, and
Fig. 27—TREE AND SOLAR IDEA AS
DEVELOPED AT ROME
meant to be so,—a drawn sword bars the old way,
that towards the tree, and behold the new one! I have
but drawn from the words of the describer of the picture, what appears from a