dom and abode of the elect. Almost immediately after this last quoted passage, she is represented as speaking herself, and saying, "Awake! O north wind, and come, thou south; Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my Beloved come into His garden, and eat His pleasant fruits." To which her Lord and Bridegroom replies, "I am come into thy garden, My sister, My spouse; I have gathered My myrrh with My spice." Thus into the garden which He had prepared, did God "put the man whom He had formed." According to our version of the sacred text, God planted the garden "eastward:" according to the Vulgate, He had planted it a principio, "from the beginning." Taking this latter sense, we learn that the Paradise of God was from the first founded in Christ, the true z Cant. v. 1. "Beginning ;" and the heavenly kingdom thus prepared for the saints "from the foundation of the world," in the blood of the Lamb, which also "from the foundation of the world" had been shed on the Altar of atonement. And if we follow our own translation, we are in a manner led to the same ideas. The east, the region of opening light, of sunrise, and of morning, is a constant type in holy writ of our blessed Lord. The text in the prophet Zechariah, which our translators render "the man whose name is the branch," is given in the Vulgate, Ecce vir oriens nomen ejus "the man whose name is the east"." And, in our bibles, though we nowhere find this name literally ascribed to Him, our Lord is spoken of under a variety of figures and expressions in which the idea of "the east" is naturally included. He is "the a Zech. vi. 12. Day-spring," or Dawn "from on high";" "the Sun of Righteousness," rising with healing in His wings; "the Star," to rise out of Jacob; "the Glory of the Lord," risen upon His people; "the Glory of the God of Israel," coming 66 from the way of the east." Of His first Advent it is said, "Kings shall come to the brightness of Thy rising;" and of the second, “As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." And accordingly in all ages, the Church has looked on the east as mystically connected with her Lord, His coming, and His kingdom. To look to the east is, indeed, to look at once toward His-cross, which according to unquestioned tradi b Luke i. 78. d Num. xxiv. 17. f Ezek. xliii. 2. c Mal. iv. 2. e Isaiah lx. 1. Matt. xxiv. 27. tion, was set up facing the west, and toward His throne of judgment, as it shall appear, to dispel the latest earthly darkness, in the morning of the resurrection. She has therefore constructed her temples with a special direction to this quarter; has reared at their eastern ends, her Altars; has taught her children to turn to the east in the recital of her holy creeds; and has interred her dead with their feet in that direction, as though in the readiest posture for rising up and greeting the light of the great day when it shall break through the trees around her cemeteries, or the storied eastern windows of her sanctuaries. In a holy mystery, then, the Paradise of man's hopes, his true and blest abiding place, is still, as it was at the first, "eastward in Eden." As appropriate to what has been now said, and as a guide to further contemplation on this subject, the author cannot refrain from introducing the two following sonnets, from the pen of a Christian poet, the author of "The Cathedral." LOST EDEN. When they return unto Thee, in the land of their enemies, and pray unto Thee toward their land which Thou gavest unto their fathers, then hear Thou their supplication in heaven. Unto the east we turn, in thoughtful gaze, O'er earth's affections; and 'mid worldlings rude, And breathe the air of their lost Paradise. H |