In the closing chapters of the New Testament, as in the opening chapters of the Old, the symbolism of the tree and the serpent, and the covenant relations involved in crossing the threshold, appear as familiar and well-understood figures of speech. “The dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,”[642] representing unholy desire, is shut out from the precincts of the New Jerusalem. Within the gates of that city is there the tree of life watered by the stream that flows from under the throne of power.[643] The city threshold is the dividing line between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. “Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.”[644]
Thus it is in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, at their beginning and at their close. And there are traces of the same truth in the teachings of the various religions, and of the more primitive customs and symbolisms. The all-dividing threshold separates the within from the without; and a covenant welcome there gives one a right to enter in through the gates into the eternal home, to be a partaker of the tree of life, with its ever-renewing and revivifying fruits.
See, for example, Herodotus’s _History_, Bk. I., chaps. 181, 182. See pp. 111 f., _supra_.
Herodotus’s _History_, Bk. I., chap. 199.
See Deut. 25 : 1–9. See, also, chapter on “Sacred Prostitution” in Wake’s _Serpent Worship_; and Professor W.M. Ramsay’s “Holy City of Phrygia,” in _Contemporary Review_ for October, 1893.
See, for example, Squier’s _Serpent Symbol_; Forling’s _Rivers of Life_; Westropp’s and Wake’s _Ancient Symbol Worship_; Knight’s _Worship of Priapus_; Jennings’s _Phallicism_; Frazer’s _Golden Bough_; Monier-Williams’s _Brahmanism and Hinduism_, and his _Buddhism_; Griffis’s _Religions of Japan_, etc.
See, for example, in addition to the books just cited, Fergusson’s _Tree and Serpent Worship_; Ohnefalach-Richter’s _Kypros, die Bibel und Homer_; Hopkins’s _Religions of India_, pp. 527 f., 533, 540, 542.