made him fair by the multitude of his branches; so that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God envied him."

We here have the authority of a prophet of Israel, that by the garden of God, or Eden, is meant the populous and fertile country of the dominant oriental nations, who were the trees in that garden, and their families and populations, the branches and leaves.

Isaiah (lxi. 3) speaks of "Trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord that he might be glorified." And St. Jerome, in his third homily on the Canticles, says "Omnes igitur homines, arbores dicuntur, sive bonæ, sive malæ.

Under the form of a tree, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, is figured to himself in his dream (Dan. iv, 10-12); and it was also the favourite figure used by our Lord when addressing himself to men in reference to their works.

Christ also represents himself as a tree "I am the vine, ye are the branches"-and it is to a tree-the cross of Christthat the Christian looks up for his salvation-the cross being identified with him who suffered on it.

OF SACRED GROVES.

Most nations, if not all, would appear, at some time or other, to have had a sacred tree, and from the worship of sacred trees, to have proceeded to the adoration of idols formed from their wood. This was the opinion of Winkleman and Caylus, it was also held by Pausanias, and is alluded to in the Bible (Isaiah xl. 29.)

The first temple mentioned in Bible history is a grove which Abraham planted when he settled for a time at Beersheba, and there called on the name of the Lord (Gen. xxi. 33).

The learned and ingenious Doctor Stukeley, in the first of his discourses on the vegetable kingdom, delivered in St. Leonard's church on Whit-sunday, 1760, speaks of this temple as "that famous oak grove of Beersheba, planted by the illustrious prophet and first Druid ABRAHAM: and from whom our celebrated British Druids came, were of the same patriarchal reformed religion, and brought the use of sacred groves to Britain."

The use, however, of groves for religious purposes, and of stones of covenant connected with trees, did not originate with

* See Palæographia Sacra. Dr. Stukeley in his Hesiol, sive Origines Brittanicæ, having ascertained, as he tells us, that the British were of oriental extraction, and that the druids, their priests, were of the first and patriarchal religion, adds, "in the course of my studies I made large researches into the particulars of that first religion which I found to be the same as Christianity."

Abraham, who in planting a grove and there calling on the name of the Lord, only followed the established usage of countries which either had not, with the Egyptians, arrived at the era of architecture, or whose religious notions did not permit them to worship the Diety in temples made with hands.

Among the Kelts, as also among the Germans and the Scandinavians, groves consecrated by the reverence of ages, and by the continuance of primitive usages, were the only public places of worship resorted to. So universally, in fact, were groves and woods dedicated to religious purposes, that among the Greek and Latin writers the words aλoos and lucus (a grove) imply consecration.

From the reported apparitions of divine beings beneath trees, and the belief in their actual presence which prevailed, it was held that angels and men might familiarly converse together, came, in all probability, the custom of consulting oracles beneath trees, as also the worship still associated with them in the east and to this source may be traced the superstitious notion touching the spirits that inhabit trees, and the sprightly fairies who sometimes dance beneath.

Pliny remarks' that even in his time the rustics observing ancient usages, dedicated to the deity any tree of pre-eminent beauty or excellence. In Herodotus we read that Xerxes with his army proceeding to Sardis, met on his way with a plane-tree, which, on account of its beauty, he presented with an offering of golden ornaments, and left a guard of honour to protect them. On one of the bas-reliefs from Koyunjik, in the British Museum, we may see the king of Assyria in his chariot devoutly saluting a tall palm-tree that stands by the way side.

SACRED BUSHES IN PERSIA.

Travellers in Persia inform us, that throughout the country the natives address themselves to sacred trees (dracte fasels), and that even the Mohammedans, who would shudder at any imputation of idolatry, believe that in their addresses and offerings to them, they only invoke the true God, the great Creator. In Sir William Ouseley's Travels in the East," we find it stated that "many an aged bush has been exalted into a dirakhti fázel from the fancied appearance of fire glowing in the midst of it, and then suddenly vanishing.”

Very old plane-trees are especially venerated, a circumstance which can excite no wonder, for the plane-tree (platanus orientalis)

1 Nat. Hist., 1. xii.

n Vol. i., Appendix ix.

This name, according to Chardin, implies "the excellent tree."

is one of the noblest of oriental trees, the admiration alike of poets and philosophers."

Maimonides, in his tract on idolatry, alludes to the adoration of trees by the Israelites (Jer. ii. 20); and it was from out of a burning bush that Moses heard the voice of the Lord, and received the injunction to put off his shoes, for that the place was holy ground.

In that magnificent Psalm (xxix), in which the rushing wind, the roaring waters, the lightning and the tempest, are by a bold, yet true figure of speech, called the voice of the Lord, we read, in our authorized version, following the vulgate (v. 9), "The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests." According to Lowth and others, the Hebrew word rendered "hinds" should have been rendered oaks, and the passage more correctly translated would be "The voice of the Lord maketh the oaks to tremble, and layeth bare the forests"-from the second part of this verse 66 and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory," we perceive the intimate association, in the mind of the writer, between the voice of the Lord, the rushing wind among the oaks, and his glory in the temple, the one being as sacred as the other.

Mr. Bruce mentions in his travels, that in Abyssinia, the wanzy-tree is avowedly worshipped as God, and Mr. Salt has confirmed this statement. In Arabia, Africa, India, China, and Japan, certain trees are reported to be still worshipped, and deity is believed to be seated on the summit of the trunk, or sufficiently near, that the attendant spirits below can readily transmit to him the prayers offered up by the faithful. This notion admits of a satisfactory explanation-these trees of grateful shade having been the resort of pious men for prayer and meditation, obtained thereby a certain sanctity: God who is ever present to hear prayer, was thus intimately associated with them, as he is by many Christians with the interior of churches; and ministering spirits, ideal personifications present only to pious minds, became, by imagination, transformed into objective realities. In an engraving given by Mr. Fergusson, in his Picturesque illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindoostan of the gateway at Sanchee, on one of the panels of the gate, is represented the worship of a tree, it is placed on an altar, before it devotees are prostrating themselves in prayer, while angels with crowns of glory are floating in the air above; it is just such a scene as a fevered imagination might picture to itself before the high altar of a Roman Basilica; and such as Chris

See Mr. Urquhart's Spirit of the East.

tian painters, who love the poetry of their art, are wont to represent; we have only to substitute the cross for the tree, and the resemblance would be complete.

We may call to mind the remark of our Lord to Nicodemus, "when thou wast under the fig-tree I saw thee," and the conviction which in consequence Nicodemus felt that Christ was God. The impression on the mind of the youthful Jacob when he awoke from his dream and exclaimed, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not," is one which would naturally occur to many who, slumbering beneath the grateful shade of umbrageous trees, had seen in their dreams a glimpse of the visionary world, and the locality, at least to them, would henceforth become sacred.

Sir William Ouseley relates from a manuscript chronicle, composed by Tabri in the ninth century, that at Najrán in Yemen, outside the city, stood a date-tree, to which on a certain day in each year, all the people went to hold a solemn festival, and having assembled about it, covered it with garments of rich embroidery, and brought to it all their idols, and laid them under it, and having gone in procession round about it, and offered up prayers and paid reverence to it, returned again to the city. The same author, in a note, has the following passage "An ingenious writer having mentioned some Indian and Japanese symbols of the divinity, adds 'arboris truncum in cujus summitate sedet supremus Creator Deus. Aliud quiddam esset observatione dignum: sed ego truncum arboris meditor, etc.' At sive Japonenses, sive Indos, sive Tibetanos adeas, ubique tibi occurret virentis arboris religio, ob symbola forsan creationis, et conservationis rerum recepta, atque retenta." The figure of Nutpe, or the goddess of the divine life, which the Egyptians represented in their sepulchral monuments as seated among the branches of the tree of life in the paradise of Osiris, was purely symbolical; it was not the deity, but was figurative of the divine sustenance of the immortal soul.

SACRED TREES IN INDIA AND JAPAN, AND THE ANCIENT HINDOO FAITH.

The worship of the bo-tree, or peepul, the ficus religiosa, enters largely into the mysteries of the Buddha faith, and did from an early period, as we find it represented in the caves at Cuttah. Under this tree Vishnu was born, the second person in the Brahminical Trinity, which was considered to be the most ancient on record, until the discovery of still earlier triads on

Georg., Alphab. Tibetan. p. 142.

the monuments of Egypt. It consists of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver or saviour, and Siva the transformer, which are the three interchangeable attributes of the great first intellectual cause Brahm. These personifications form the Trimourti, which is expressed liturgically by the very sacred name AUM or Oм, and adored under the symbol of the waterlily.

All that we know of the ancient faith of India, anterior to the advent of Buddha, the ninth incarnation of Vishnu, is to be found in the Vedas, probably compiled about twelve or thirteen centuries before Christ, or a little earlier; and in what may be gathered from the institutes of Menu, which are some five or six centuries later: in these there is a form of salutation addressed to the gods of great trees.

Mr. Colebrooke, in his essay on the Vedas, states that "the real doctrine of the whole Indian Scripture, is the unity of the deity in whom the universe is comprehended." A profound and solemn conception which has been the philosophical faith of man from the earliest known period of his written history. It was the doctrine of the Egyptian mysteries, and of the Orphic theology; was held by prophets and philosophers, by poets sacred and profane, and was embodied by the northern imagination under the figure of the mundane tree.

The Aboriginal people of India are the Tamul tribes; the Sanscrit speaking people were strangers to that land, they were the conquering race and came across the Indus many centuries before the Christian era; bringing with them in their Vedantic lore, the traditions and the religion of that great central source of nations from which the Persians, and probably the Medes, migrated to the south, and the European races to the west. Dr. Albert Weber, in his Academische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte, remarks that the commencement of the Vedic civilization certainly reaches back to a time when the Indo Aryans still lived as one people with the Persic Aryans-probably this may have been in Bactria about 1500 B.C. The decyphering of the great arrow-headed inscription at Behistun shewed that it was an old form of Persian, closely allied to the Vedic sanscrit of India on the one hand, and to the Zend on the other.

The religion of India, like that of other countries, has had its revolutions. The religion of Brahma was of a more metaphysical character than the worship of nature-gods which preceded it, or than that which followed it, when Siva brought in the adoration

Mr. Fergusson considers the Kali yug, 3101 B.C., and which appears to be a fixed historical date, to represent, whether correctly or not, the first irruption of the Sanscrit races into Hindostan.