GATHERINGS BY C. H. SPURGEON.
When staying at Mentone the visitor is sure to observe a sunny promontory which juts into the sea at the extreme east. It is so constantly bright, and catches the sun so long after the shadows have fallen elsewhere, that it is quite impossible to avoid noticing it, and inquiring its name. “That is Bordighera,” is sure to be the prompt reply; and if you take a carriage and go to the aforesaid Bordighera you will find it to be like Jericho, the city of palm trees; plenteously endowed no doubt with those noble plants because it basks so continually in the beams of the sun. There are forests of palms around the town, supplying such a spectacle as can be rarely seen out of the West Indies. Other towns along the Riviera possess a few stately date, palms and boast in them, but in Bordighera they abound, and mark: out the spot as altogether peculiar. The grand ceremonials of Palm Sunday and Easter at Rome require many leaves of the palm, and to Bordighera is given the honor of supplying St. Peter’s and the Pope’s Chapel. We were happy in seeing the palms before their fronds had been stripped off for papal uses; but had we been there after the stripping we should have been somewhat compensated by the story which is told of the way in which Bordighera obtained its peculiar Easter privilege. We had heard the anecdote told concerning a British tar, but that is an invention of our national vanity, the truth being as we now tell it. An immense multitude had assembled in Rome to witness the raising of a huge obelisk. Silence was enjoined upon all, on pain of death,, while a host of laborers ragged at the cables of the lifting machinery. There was a suspense, the stone would not settle on its base., all the strength applied to it seemed insufficient, and yet the work was so nearly accomplished that the hitch was all the more deplorable. There was a sailor in the throng who saw it all, and knew the remedy; but the sentence of death held him in prudent silence. All men grazed with excitement while the monolith still resisted all force, and it seemed probable that the strain must be relaxed and the task abandoned. At last, death or no death, our sailor friend could restrain himself no longer, but shouted with all his might, “Wet the ropes!” It was done, and the obelisk was in its place, but the seafaring man had been seized by the papal guards, and was now to answer for his daring breach of infallible rule. He
turned out to be a man of Bordighera, and being pardoned for his offense was also rewarded for his courage and common sense by being allowed to ask any favor he chose. He only asked that his native town might be favored to supply his Holiness with palms; upon what terms we know not, but from the fellow’s shrewdness we may be sure that they were not to be disposed of without money and without price. Our inference from the legend is, that he who knows how to do the right thing at the right moment is the man who will bear the palm. Many men have wit, but they have left it at. home; they know that, the ropes should be wetted, but they do not happen to think of it at the time.
Of course at Bordighera the palm is grown more for ornament than for use, and a most stately adornment it is to any street, or garden, or plain, where it may be found; but it is in other lands famous beyond measure for its usefulness. Beauty and utility are nowhere more completely united than in the date palm. In Kirby’s “Chapters on Trees” we read, “The blessings of the date palm are without limit to the Arab. Its leaves give a refreshing shade in a region where the beams of the sun are almost insupportable.
Men, and also camels, feed upon the fruit, and sweet liquor is obtained from the trunk by making an incision. It is called the milk of the palm tree, and by fermentation it becomes wine.
The wood of the tree is used for fuel, and as a material for building the native huts; and ropes, mats, baskets, beds, and all kinds of articles are manufactured from the fibers of the leaves. The Arab cannot imagine how a nation can exist without date trees; and he may well regard it, as the greatest injury that he can inflict upon his enemy to cut; down his date trees.
“There is rather an amusing story told of an Arab woman, who once came to England in the service of an English lady, and remained there as nurse for some few years. At; length, however, she went back to her own country, where she was looked upon as a great traveler, and a person that had seen the world. Her friends and relations were never tired of listening to what she had to tell them, and of asking her questions. She gave such a glowing account of England, and the fine houses, and rich people, and grand clothes she had seen, that the Arabs became quite envious, and began to despise their own desert land, with its few villages scattered here and there. Indeed, the effect of the conversation was to make them very low spirited, and to wish they had been born in England. But happily this
state of things did not last. The woman chanced to say as a kind of after- thought, that one thing was certainly a drawback in the happy country she had been describing. In vain she had looked for the well-known date trees, and she had been told that not one single tree grew in England. It was a country without dates. ‘Ah, well!’ said her neighbors, much relieved, and their faces brightening up, ‘that alters the case. We have no wish now to live in England!’”
The Israelites were very fond of calling their daughters Tamar, or palm tree, the, stately beauty of the tree appearing to be peculiarly symbolical of a queenly woman. What a sight must Tadmor or Tamar in the Desert have been! The Greeks rightly turned the Hebrew name into Palmyra; it was a palm city in the center of the wilderness where the caravans halted on their journey between the luxurious East and the needy West. Scarcely would the two thousand five hundred columns of pure white marble, all gleaming in the brilliance of an eastern sun, have rivaled the glory of the palms which lifted their pillar-like trunks into the air two hundred feet, and then threw out their graceful fronds, light as the feather of the ostrich, yet strong to resist the storms from heaven. Alas, the watercourses which feed the gardens of that magnificent city are broken up, “the tanks which supplied the caravans of the merchants have been destroyed by war or by
earthquakes, and, since the discovery of the passage by sea from Europe to India, the march of the caravans in that direction has ceased, there is no one to repair the stations of the desert, to dress the gardens, or to renew the palms.” In vain do we mention the names of Solomon, and Zenobia, Adrian and Aurelian, the palm-treed city of the wilderness is dead, and the Bedouin prowls around her tomb. Have we not seen flourishing churches also pass away in the same manner? Neglect, forgetfulness of the sacred irrigation of prayer, failure of spiritual life, and other causes, have caused the glory to depart, and made the city to become a heap, and the garden a desolation. May such evil never happen in our day, but may we see the Lord’s hand stretched out still to prosper his people.
We did not commence writing with the intention of saying all that can be said upon the palm tree, for many have been over this ground before us, and have brought out a vast variety of useful lessons; ours is but; a leisure paper of odds and ends, perhaps not quite so well known to our readers as other matters about the palm may be. We trove seen them growing in the Bordighera nurseries, and have borne upon our shoulder weighty branches pulled from growing specimens; we have, also seen the male, or barren tree
planted where it could fertilize its fruit-bearing neighbors; we have marked the little ferns growing upon the decayed ends of the fronds, and watched the happy lizards sporting in the crevices, and we seem now to be at home with palms, atleast as much so as a man can be who has never been in Egypt or Persia. Probably there are as many instructive uses in the palm tree as there are actual uses in its material, but we are too idle to work them out just now, and so we open a book written at Calcutta by the Revelation J. Long, and transfer a page to our magazine to let our readers see what an Indian missionary makes out of this oriental tree. He, says,
“The righteous are like the palm.”
1. “The palm tree grows in the desert. Earth is a desert to the Christian;
true believers are refreshed in it even as a palm in the Arabian desert, so Lot amid Sodom’s wickedness, and Enoch who walked with ‘God amongst the antediluvians.
2. “The palm tree grows from the sand, but the sand is not its food; water below feeds its tap roots, though the heavens above be brass. Some Christians grow, not as the lily, Hosea 14:5, by green pastures, or as the willow by the water-courses, Isaiah 44:4, but as the palm of the desert. So Joseph among the cat worshippers of Egypt, Daniel in voluptuous
Babylon: faith’s penetrating root, reaching the fountains of living waters.
3. “The palm tree is beautiful, with its tall and verdant canopy, and the silvery flashes of its Waving plumes; so the Christian virtues are not like the creeper or bramble, tending downwards, their palm branches shoot upwards, and seek the things above, where Christ dwells, Colossians 3:1;
some trees are crooked and gnarled, but the Christian is a tall palm as a son of the light, Matthew 3:12; Philippians 2:15. The Jews were called a
crooked generation, Deuteronomy 32:5, and Satan a crooked serpent, Isaiah 27, but the Christian is upright like the palm. Its beautiful unfading leaves made it, an emblem of victory, it was twisted into verdant booths at;
the feast of tabernacles, and the multitude, when escorting Christ to his coronation in Jerusalem, spread leaves on the way, Matthew 21:8. So victors in heaven are represented as having palms in their hands, Revelation 7:9. No dust, adheres to the leaf as it does to the battree; the Christian is in the world, not of it, the dust of earth’s desert adheres not to his palm leaf.
The leaf of the palm is the same — it does not, fall in. winter, and even in the summer k has no holiday clothing, it is an evergreen.
4. “The palm tree is very useful. The Hindus reckon it has 360 uses. Its shadow shelters, its fruit refreshes the weary traveler, and it points out to the pilgrim the place where water may be found. Such was Barnabas, a son of consolation, Acts 4:36, stroh Lydia, Dorcas, others, who on the king’s highway showed the way to heaven, as Philip did. to the Ethiopian eunuch, Acts 9:34.
5. “The palm tree produces fruit even in old age. The best dates are produced when the tree is from thirty to one hundred years old; three hundred pounds of dates are annually yielded; so the Christian grows happier and more useful as he grows older: knowing his own faults more, he is more mellow to others; he is like the setting sun, beautiful, mild, and enlarged; or like Elim, where the wearied Jews found twelve wells and seventy palm trees.”
This is very good, and has somewhat of freshness in it. It reminds us of what Dr. Thomson says in “The Land and the Book,” upon the text, “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree. Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.” He says, “The palm grows slowly but steadily, from century to century,” uninfluenced by the alterations of the seasons which affect other trees. It does not rejoice overmuch in winter’s copious rain, nor does it droop under the drought and the burning sun of summer. Neither heavy weights which men place upon its head, nor the importunate urgency of the wind can sway it aside from perfect uprightness. There it stands, looking calmly down upon the world below, and patiently yielding its large clusters of golden fruit from generation to generation. They bring forth fruit in old age. The allusion to being planted in the house of the Lord is probably drawn from the custom of planting beautiful and long-lived trees in the courts of temples and palaces, and in all ‘high places’ used for worship. This is still common;
nearly every palace and mosque and convent in the country has such trees in the courts, and, being well protected there, they flourish exceedingly.
Solomon covered all the walls of the ‘Holy of Holies’ round about with palm trees. They were thus planted, as it were, within the very house of the Lord; and their presence was not only ornamental, but appropriate and highly suggestive. The very best emblem, not. only of patience in well- doing, but of the rewards of the righteous — a fat and flourishing old age
— a peaceful end — a glorious immortality. The Jews used palm branches as emblems of victory in their seasons of rejoicing, and Christians do the same on Palm Sunday, in commemoration of our Savior’s triumphant entry
into Jerusalem. They are often woven into an arch, and placed over the head of the bier which carries man to his ‘long home,’ and speak sweetly of victory and eternal life.”
We were thinking of the way of climbing a palm tree, and noted how easy it would be to step from the notch of one departed frond to another, but we could not see our way clear to read the lesson of the physical fact till, turning to good Moody Stuart’s “Song of Songs,” we found him thus sweetly expatiating upon the eighth verse of the seventh chapter: —
“I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof.” This is for the purpose of gathering the fruit, or rather it is the grasping of the fruit itself, for the laden, boughs of the palm are little else than vast fruit-stalks. No tree presents a more beautiful picture of
abundance; the single, branchless, untapered stem, the magnificent crown of branching leaves at the summit of the stem, and beneath the leaves the boughs or fruit-stalks, each of them clustered round with innumerable dates, and sometimes hanging downward not far from the outstretched hand. The fruit of the palm is so abundant that in some of the oases of the great African desert, it is said to form the principal food of those sons of Ethiopia, ‘who will soon stretch out their hands to God,’ and pluck living fruit from a nobler palm. In these last days we sometimes look back with desire on the patriarchal infancy of the church ere the palm tree had attained its present height, and when our fathers in the faith gathered the ripe fruit from the low summit of its still slender stem.
“Sweet were the days when thou didst lodge with Lot, Struggle with Jacob, sit with Gideon,
Advise with Abraham, when thy power could not Encounter Moses’ strong complaint and moan;
Thy words were then, Let me alone.
One might have sought and found thee presently, At some fair oak, or bush, or cave, or well.”
Herbert.
But if the tree has grown taller, its fruit is more abundant, in words of life multiplied tenfold to us and to our children; its thickened stem is more easily grasped, and is notched round year by year with helpful footsteps by the very gathering of the laden boughs. Each successive produce of the tree both prepares for a greater, and leaves like the palm a permanent step in
the ladder by which we may reach the ample fruit, all the past a handmaid to the future.”
Our musings and gatherings must now end. We must go from the palm trees of a sunny clime to the oaks and elms of Old England, which also have their teaching, and one of these days we may perhaps put it into words for our readers.
THE SWORD AND THE TROWEL.
DECEMBER, 1877.