Tree of Life

“ It is a hard road to travel, a road of trouble and need. But where this black road of difficulties crosses the good red road of spirit at the center of the hoop of the world, that place is very holy, and there springs the Tree of Life. For those who look upon the Tree, it shall fill with leaves and bloom and singing birds; and it shall shield them as a sheo [prairie hen] shields her chickens. ”

“ Though people no longer think of it as the Tree of Life, they are beginning to realize that the tree is what enables our race to make a living and to live comfortably and hopefully upon this beautiful world. ”

“ No one pair of black eyes is just like another, no two leaves upon the same tree. And not a yellow blossom can spring up by the wayside, without a [66] red or a white one at hand for contrast. Are the clouds copies of each other? Are the shadows on the hills ever twice the same? Take for your comfort the full assurance that the very Tree of Life—which in Eden seems to have borne but one manner of fruit—in heaven shall bear twelve. But we cannot imagine it—in its fulness. We must look, not to see clear outlines and distinct colours, but only the flood of heavenly light. ”

“ Draw we then our food from Him, eat we of the fruit of that divine tree, recognize we his influence within our souls, obey we all his commands in their true spirit and intent, love we the higher life proceeding from the Lord who is in the midst of our mental garden, then truly do we live. The fruit of the tree of life is all the goodness and wisdom which we receive from the Lord—humbly acknowledging that it is his and not our own—and appropriate to the upbuilding and sustenance of the soul. ”

“ Thinking this may be a lost Eden, I look curiously to discover the life tree, to see Mae and father, who have turned deathly pale, reel in their seats. Stopping quickly, we put snow on their heads and bind it by leaves of a high shrub we are under. Shuddering, they grasp the leaves in their teeth and swallow the juice as their breath revives. ”

“ But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight.
The tree many-rooted
That swells to the sky
With frondage red-fruited,
The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.
But the Gods of your fashion
That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live. ”

“ As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramification. ”

“ After all, this thing wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon that well-top in Illar through whose shadow he had entered here, and nothing in that bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why——? What living menace dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of horror? ”

“ Every leaf has its own separate life. It drops and withers. But the tree lives on. Every tree falls in process of time or under the cruel axe, but the forest of which the tree is but a part lives, and so with us leaves of the human tree. ”

“ The tree in such surroundings must die; it can make for itself no new condition of existence; it can hear no sweet question on the breeze that washes through the grove, "why will ye die?" It cannot look upward—as it is scourged by the driving spray, and tormented by the fierce wind—and cry, "O God of my life, give me life." It has no will; it cannot transplant itself. But the human tree can root itself in a happier place. ”

“ So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit, however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of this vitality. ”

“ Among the traditions and monuments of nearly every country of the globe are to be found traces of a sacred tree—a Tree of Life. In various countries there appear two traditional trees, the one typical of the continuation of physical life, the other representing spiritual life, or the life of the soul. After the age of pure Nature-worship had passed, however, and serpent, fire, and phallic faiths had been introduced, the original signification of the tree, like that of all other religious emblems, became considerably changed. ”

“ Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bed-rooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea smoking their cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way ... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs, Whitaker's Almanack, the fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter. ”

“ In the grove of Eridu stood a Tree of Life, which appears to have been a World Tree, like Yggdrasil, and at the same time to have possessed the property of restoring life and strength to the individual. ”

“ Hence, the Tree of Life, destroyed at the flood, on account of man’s wickedness, was replaced on the same spot, centuries after, by the Cross,—converted by the Redeemer into a second and everlasting Tree of Life. ”

“ Thus is the fallen tree transformed into multitudinous life, bursting above the soil in new generations of beauty, until scarce a shred remains that does not live again. And creeping rootlets of trees hunt these last fragments underground, and crawling, flexible worms eagerly swallow the earth itself, and digest from it the stray crumbs of the old tree that are mixed throughout the soil.
Nor have we yet got to the bottom of this cycle of vegetable life. There are worlds, solar systems of life beneath all this, dwelling far below the reach of the eyesight of man. ”

“ You speak to your friend of the beauty of the tree and of the goodness of God in bestowing such a gift to men; but perhaps you do not speak nor even think of the coarse, unsightly roots hidden deep in the ground. But that tree owes its beauty and its life to roots. The foliage is bright and fresh and green because the roots are burrowing deep in a rich and well-watered soil. The flavoring of the fruit is generated by the roots down in the dark and silent chamber of the earth. ”

“ But the Tree of Life seems to have been provided, for the purpose of this change being effected, through the eating of its fruit, if they had proved themselves worthy of the favor. The animal nature will sooner or later dissolve. It was not constituted so as to continue in life for ever, independent of any further modification. ”

“ Spring, with all her wealth of life and joy, finds within the forest many a tree unconscious of her approach; a thousand young plants springing up about the fallen trunk, the shaggy roots, seek to soften the gloomy wreck with a semblance of the verdure it bore of old; but ere they have thrown their fresh and graceful wreaths over the mouldering wood, half their own tribe wither and die with the year. ”

“ In the symbolism of these nations the sacred tree sometimes figures as a type of the universe, and represents the whole system of created things, but more frequently as a ‘tree of life,’ by whose fruit the votaries of the gods are nourished with divine strength, and one prepared for the joys of immortality. The most ancient types of this mystical tree of life are the date, the fig, and the pine or cedar. ”

“ Straight toward the Tree she paced, and all the blossoms glowed more vividly at her nearness, the branches stretching toward her, rippling with eagerness.
Priestess though she was, he could not believe that she was going to come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which roused such a panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of him. But she did not swerve or slow in her advance. Walking delicately over the flowery grass, arrogantly luminous in the twilight, so that her body was the center and focus of any landscape she walked in, she neared her horribly eager god. ”

“ She gave this homely explanation with a smile and the air of a grown person trying to convey to the immature mind of a child an explanation of some of Nature's phenomena.
I reflected upon their social condition and arrived at the conviction that there is no occupation in life but what has its usefulness and necessity, and, when united to culture and refinement, its dignity. A tree has a million leaves, yet each individual leaf, insignificant as it may appear, has its special share of work to perform in helping the tree to live and perfect its fruit. ”

“ The tree of life - חיים chaiyim; of lives, or life-giving tree, every medicinal tree, herb, and plant, whose healing virtues are of great consequence to man in his present state, when through sin diseases of various kinds have seized on the human frame, and have commenced that process of dissolution which is to reduce the body to its primitive dust. ”

“ If the Garden of Eden is a phrase indicative of the state of the people of the Lord's first Church on earth, these trees must, in some way, be further descriptive of that state. Their very names indicate this. A tree of life—a natural tree that would bear fruit, the eating whereof would render our existence on earth one of endless duration—is a thing that we cannot comprehend. To suppose that any natural fruit could nourish our souls to eternal life, in the higher spiritual meaning of that term, would tax our credulity still more largely. ”

“ Some have made this Tree of Life a Representation of Christ, and if so, here, as in a Glass, darkly Man saw his Saviour before he stood in need of him: The Tree of Life planted in the midst of Paradise, was to preserve Adam’s Life, and without doubt had done so, if he had not rebelled. According to a Learned Jew, the Tree of Life represents Piety ”

“ Trees, like people, struggle for existence, and an aged tree, like an aged person, has not only a striking appearance, but an interesting biography. I have read the autobiographies of many century-old trees, and have found their life-stories strange and impressive. The yearly growth, or annual ring of wood with which trees envelop themselves, is embossed with so many of their experiences that this annual ring of growth literally forms an autobiographic diary of the tree's life. ”

“ Even were it not to be inferred from other evidence, there could be little doubt that the people amongst whom the above conception arose must have been 112 already familiar with tree-worship. The mighty stem, in which the great gods dwelt, was but a poetical amplification of the sacred, spirit-inhabited tree, and arose out of the same idealising process as that which gave birth to the nearly related tree of knowledge and tree of life. ”

“ The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our 215study for their illustrations of man’s primitive animistic theory of nature. This is remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as inhabited, like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a body, is often hard to determine. ”

“ When we come to consider the tree as a living individual, a form of life contemporaneous with our own, and to realise that it has its birth and death, its struggles for life and its periods of peace and abundance, we will soon feel for it a keener sympathy and interest and withal a veneration greater than it has ever aroused in us before. ”

“ At this corner, too, the tree-groups teach us the same lesson; repeated and beautified by the tender water hues, they, in lending beauty to the stream, enhance their own, and give another of the innumerable instances in which by nature we are shown how all things are adapted and suited to their several stations; and, by aiding and assisting one another, increase their own beauty or usefulness: thus should it be in life. ”

“ Many writers consider this tree an emblem of that life which man should ever live, provided he continued in obedience to his Maker. And probably the use of this tree was intended as the means of preserving the body of man in a state of continual vital energy, and an antidote against death. ”

“ From seed to seed the life of the tree is a cycle, without beginning and without end. At no one point in the cycle can we say, Here is the purpose of the tree. Incidentally the tree may minister to the needs and comfort and pleasure of man. ”

“ The tree of life, so called, because it had that quality, that by eating of the fruit of it man would have been preserved in a constant state of health, vigor and strength; and would not have died at all.
3. The tree of knowledge, to which the deceitful serpent falsely assumed the power of imparting a superior kind of knowledge beyond that which God was pleased to give. ”

“ As men came to recognise in themselves two natures—the physical and spiritual, the life of the body and the 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.” ”