Forlong - Rivers of Life

Tree Worship.
thousand other illustrations, and not only from this one, in the celebrated temple to
IOna, the new banner, which the young faith has selected. I too have stood and
studied this remarkable picture, and wondered if its circumambient Jordan would
ever increase its bounds to embrace all the family of man, and wash away the Phallic
mound, and release the dove from its ark; for we have here indeed a. very Phallic-
looking picture, which if we but twined a serpent on that tree in the fountain, we
might suspect had originated in Benares or Kashmere.
The Palm and Ficus have, it is true, gone, but only so in their natural forms; the
substance, or “real presence,” is all here. Here also is the Caput-Oline or Olympus,
with a fountain of water, from which flow the waters of the life of mankind, and in
this has been placed the old, old cross and the fount seems to suit it, as the ring of the
Egyptian Crux-Ansata; but there is no place now for the sweet goddess who settled
amidst the branches of the old Tree of Life. So she has disappeared, but by no means
altogether; for she has left her symbol, the mystic Dove, illuminating it from above.
There does not here seem much for the old and new faiths to quarrel about,
and certainly not for the adherents of each to hate and loathe one anothcr; not
to say to slaughter each other for, by thoousands and tens of thousands, and for
long centuries. A wise umpire might, one would think, from a mere glance at the
leading features of each, have reconciled them; but it is not so with faiths; a shred
of an old vestment is quite sufficient to draw the sword, and to light the fires of a
hundred Smithfields. And surely a descent from Osiris to the Palm tree, then to the
Ficus Sycamora, an ignoring of Netpe, though the substitution be the IOni, then
the quarrel as to whom the Cross belonged, a denial of fair Netpe’s baptism and
office as the Lady, or “bread distributor,” now claimed for the virgin mother of Bethlehem,
though both words signify the same, was enough to arouse the ire of even
saints. Whether it should have been so or not, it was so; and the new God, and new
Virgin, and Cross, were boldly declared as having no connection by idea or otherwise
with the old; yet wise philooophers, in secret nooks (for they were too discrcet to
speak their minds) no doubt smiled and thought otherwise. They had learned that
though faiths may be held by their votaries to have started at times with a. tabula rasa,
yet none ever remain so; for God moves not, so far as historians and critics have
been able to investigate, by new creations, or by fits and starts. He ever weaves the
new threads of progressive ideas into the old ones, for the bottles are too fragile to
bear an entirely new wine. The discreet old philoaophers probably said among themselves,
“This Virgin and Prophet of Nazareth, whether historical or mythicaL must have
sprung from the old, old virgins and prophets, and in times the ideas will again entwine
themselves about our old ones, altering, and mayhap improving on them, but never,
as time progresses, able to ignore them.”
Netpe, the Holy Spirit of the Egyptian Tree of Life, was female, as was Jehovah,
but after ages chamged her sex, from casual circumstances noticed elsewhere. “She was,”
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