RELIGIOUS LIFE

Southland Times, Issue 23989, 2 December 1939, Page 17

RELIGIOUS LIFE

[By

ICHTHUS]

“BUT ONLY GOD CAN MAKE A TREE”

Last week when I wrote about springs I knew already what my next subject would he. It would be trees. It could only be trees. For there they stood beside my spring, a group of half a dozen fine trees, the last remainder of the bush that once covered this land before the white man came to it. A sapling is slender and willowy, with the dew of its youth upon it, and it always makes me think of a young girl growing up to, but not yet arrived at womanhood. But a mature tree is like a grown man in the full prime, of his strength. The massive trunk, in its full development, is the very emblem of firmly set and robust power. The storm sweeps through its branches, but the trunk stands there immovable and seems to laugh back to the gale in sheer joy of the encounter. Great, strong trees, what a joy they are to behold. In a friend’s home recently I saw one of Chance’s fine photographic studies of a group of trees just such as mine. Half a dozen strong, firm boles standing there in silent majesty. I was fascinated by the picture of them and could look at nothing else in the room. What a charm there is in trees. In this centennial time in the history of our young land have we no poet to sing us a song of the trees? What is more characteristic, more emblematic, of New Zealand than her trees? It was to a tree-covered land that our first settlers came from their long voyage over the sea. From the trees they built their homes; with wood from the trees they made the fires that warmed their bodies and cooked their food; the trees gave them the posts and rails with which they fenced in their land, and guarded their stock. The Maori, like ourselves, was an invader. It is the trees that are the true, original inhabitants of the land. How could I write of my spring, and not say something about my trees? TREES IN NATURE When the great Creator brought this wonderful world into being He planted it with trees and now we can never think of nature without having trees in the mind’s eye. Have you ever thought of the part that trees have played in nature? They are very ancient inhabitants of the earth. We read in the first book of the Bible that the first man and woman when they had sinned hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So there were trees in the beginning. When the first man was born on the earth the trees were already here. But that was a late day in their history, though it was man’s first day. That coal that burns so warmly and so brightly in your fireplace is the gift to you of the trees. But they grew on the earth some five hundred millions of years ago, so the scientists tell us, in the carboniferous era, when the birds were just beginning to evolve from the reptiles. Not for milleniums yet would man appear on the scene. Perhaps, like me, you dug in your garden today, or cultivated your fields. Did you think how much of the fertility of your soil is due to the loam contributed to it down the ancient past by the fallen leaves and decaying bodies' of the trees? We sometimes grumble about what a tree takes out of the soil. But did you ever stop to reflect upon the marvellous chemistry by which the trees breathe in the vital properties of the airy and the sunlight, store them and transmute them, and then, century upon century, give themselves and their stored-up treasure to help make the very soil from which we take our living? The fertile soil which man found upon the earth is in no small or unimportant part the work of the trees. How much they have done to prevent the denuding of the soil by wind and water we begin to understand a little better in our time. It would have been better for us had we learned it earlier. We have inherited a world in the making of which as we find it the trees have played a very wonderful part. They are still playing that part as nature’s processes go on. But life is more than utility. It is beauty. And the beauty of the earth with its power to stir, the deep soul of us, owes much to trees. A landscape, without trees would lack an essential element of nature. Bird life and bird song could not be sustained without the trees, and for much other wild life which makes up nature the

trees provide home, protection, and food. TREES IN HUMAN LIFE But are we not bound to come to a conclusion still more vital to us than this? Not only would nature without trees lack an essential element of beauty. Not only would it be impossible for bird life and much other wild life to be sustained. The matter touches us much more closely. Could. human life itself be sustained but for the trees? We can hardly conceive of human life without the shelter its timber has given us in our dwellings, and the fires it has made possible. Our industrial age has been the product of coal, and without trees there would be no coal. So the economic wealth and pre-eminence which the industrial age gave to our England is the gift of the trees. The ships, too, in which our first navigators sailed to the discovery, and our emigrants to the populating of Empire, were built of wood. Our Empire may be said to be built upon English oak. Whatever substitutes might have been used had there been no wood from trees, the wealth of England and the establishment of Empire has, in the course history actually followed, depended upon trees. Iron, did you say? And how would you smelt iron without fires?

But wait a moment. Do you know that the trees breathe in carbon from the atmosphere, an element in the air that is poison to man? Do you realize that without the trees purifying the air of a great volume of carbon our atmosphere would not be such as man could breathe? So that trees have made not only the soil we live upon, the homes we dwell in, the fires we sit beside and at which we cook our food, the development of our shipping and trade and overseas settlement. They have made even the very air we breathe. It is to these stately trees, and their ancestors and their whole family down the long eras of the earth’s history, that we owe the possibility of our life upon the earth. When next Margaret brings me an apple on a plate, or arranges with deft fingers the flowers in her vases, I shall astonish her by the excess of my gratitude. But she knoWs my vagaries, and that sometimes they are sign and symbol that I have found my way to some shining truth we were forgetting, and I think she will understand TREES IN THE BIBLE After all this I was not surprised to find myself reflecting upon trees in the Bible. For the Bible is the deepest book we have, and the truest to. life, as it is and as it is meant to be. The East, from which the Bible came, is not the most densely afforested part of the earth's surface. But there are trees on nearly every page of the Bible. I have space for only a few references.

To start at the beginning, there were trees in the Garden of Eden, and it was the misuse of a tree, and disobedience to a law regarding it, by which man lost his Eden. Strangely enough, it is called there by a mystic name which may have a hidden significance. It is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Then who that knows the Psalms—and he is a poor man who does not know them well—does not recall the description in the first Psalm of the man who walks in the law of the Lord: “He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither.” The Master Himself had an eye and a word for the trees and the grasses of the field. One of His sayings laid down the unanswerable principle that “a tree is known by its fruit.” 1 It was under the trees of Gethsemane’s garden that He prayed in agony and won His victory and ours. And it was on a tree that he was lifted up that He might draw all men unto Himself. The last book of the Bible has a verse that we might lay to heart in these days of the conflicts of the nations. In John’s vision of the City of God come down from heaven there is a River of Life, and beside it a Tree of Life, “and the leaves of it were for the healing of the nations.”

A familiar song popular with singers today has it like this: Poems were made by fools like me. But only God can make a tree. Yes: only God can make a tree. They are His creation and His gift.