THE TREE OF DEATH.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1717, 25 January 1905, Page 77 (Supplement)

THE TREE OF DEATH.

'• (By a Banker.) ••Probably the most deadly and venomous prodiict of the vegetable world which this earth produces is the poison-ous-Upas tree of Javai, around which have clustered so many myths and legends, and of which so many extravagant travellers’ tales and mendacious tables have been from time to- time disseminated. '• According to the veracious explorers of a bygone age the lethal tree grew in a weird and terrible district known as the valley of - death; a veritable charnel ground, encumbered with the whitened bones of men and women, bors.es and Gallic, birds and reptiles. Here the bones of a horse intermingled with those of its rider, .both having simultaneously dropped dead,under the influence of the fatal miasma; here the remains of a herd of, animals which had incautiously ventured within the fatal zone, or of a flock of birds, which coming within the range' of ■ the pestiferoiis vapours, fell suffocated to the ground; and here, all around the deadly tree, piles, of bones of condemned slaves, sent thither to collect the poisonous juice of the tree, with a promise of freedom if they succeeded in returning. But all this is mostly fable; for , although, if the milky venomous juice with which the tree is saturated —roots, trunks, boughs, and leaves —bq injected into man or animal, or even accidentally touches a scratch, death may ensue in a few minutes, the.- natives therefore employing it t. > poison the barbs of tlieir arrows, yet the lurid descriptions of this dismal valley of death, litis parched and arid wilderness, are pictures drawn entirely from the. imagination. For the valley is a very paradise of beauty, clothed in luxuriant verdure, adorned with many of the lovely flowers and •graceful palms and ferns of f tic s repa-s. and the home of innumerable brilliantly plum aged birds and of resplendent . glittering butterflies Strange to say, - another tree ot the same family (“Atrocarpus”) is the priceless bread fruit tree, a tree winch provides nourishing sustenance to multitudes of the human race; the one therefore being literally a tree of death, the other a. t ree of life: the fruit: of the one, a virulent and baneful destroyer, ol life.

the fruit of the other, a valuable and nutritious sustainer of life. And is there not, too, in the spiritual world a simile to all this? For those who have been poisoned by the deadly X ■pas tree of sin, and who know for certain that unless the venom is purged .from them they cannot by any possibility whatever inherit the glory-land, must press towards the symbolical “"tree of life which is in'Jfche midst of the Paradise cf God”; in other words must cry earnestly for the never refused aid of the Holy Spirit of God to enable them to grasp the great fact that .the Son of God paid the penalty due by. them to Divine Justice, and that through His stripes they may, if they will, be healed.