Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
most delightful green retreats and blessed abodes in groves,” were what the gods loved,
and “the first bright sight he saw” when coming “from the nether world.”
What place, indeed, especially in intertropical lands, could be more grateful to
the man bent on pious thought than the secluded woodland retreat, or the dark
recesses of a forest, or of some ancient grove, hallowed by many pious memories of
the past, in connection with Fathers whom he and his now worshipped as gods, or at
least reverenced as demi-gods? What so favourable to the devotional spirit, and so
inspiring to prayer and praise, as whispering winds on the rustling leaves of
half-idolised old moss-grown monarchs of the woods, sweetened perhance by
the soft cadence of that dear murmering brook, whose winding stream recalls
so many sad as well as joyful reminiscences, and all quickened into a “dream-
land” by the melodious songs of the woodland choristers, as these rise ever
and again into wild pathos, or sink into a sweetness grateful to the thoughtful soul?
Alas! for poor emotional man if the spirit be bold and brave, and the soul fired
beyond the guidance of reason; for the pietist has then too often madly sprung forth
and declared that he has been in the presence of his God. In all ages there have been
men who have felt this in more fulness than I can describe it, and have rushed
forth to the world from their retreats, be they the groves of Bood-gaya or the wildernesses
of Western Asia, determined to declared what they have deluded themselves into
believing—that God has spoken to them. In his excellent little book on Symbolism,
under the head Sacred Trees, Mr. Barlow has expressed what I have long felt. He
says, “the most generally received symbol of life is a tree—as also the most appropriate.
. . . There might be an innate appreciation of the beautiful and grand in this
impression, conjoined with the conception of a more sublime truth, and the first principles
of a natural theology, but in most instances it would appear rather to have been
the result of an ancient and primitive symbolical worship, at one time universally prevalent.”
(The italics are mine.) As men came to recognise in themselves two natures
—the physical and the spiritual, the life of the body and life of the soul—“so these came
to be represented either by two trees, as sometimes found, or in reference to universal
life, by one tree only.” (Barlow, p. 85.) Some thousands of years before even the
age imputed to Genesis, there were sculptures on the Zodiac of Dendera—Egypt—two
sacred trees, the Western and Eastern; the first was truth and religion—the sacred
palm surmounted by the ostrich feather—the latter, the vital or generative forces of
nature, beyound which Egypt thought she had risen, therein surpassing her Eastern
parent; at least so I feel inclined to class them chronologically. “Besides the monumental
evidence furnished,” says Barlow, “of a sacred tree, a Tree of Life, there is an
historical and traditional evidence of the same thing found in the early literature of various
nations, in their customs and popular useages.” All grand, extraordinary, beautiful, or
highly useful trees, have in every land at some time been associated with the noble, wonderful,
lovely, and beneficient ideas, which man has attributed to his God or to nature.