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ment ; but even unto death would love continue, profounder, more ardent and more fit for service and sacrifice in the end than in the beginning — able to take up the glorious challenge, " Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us." To this victor, loving on in spite of all deadening and benumbing influences, a very great promise is given : " To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God." The Nicolaitans promised sensual enjoyment, as in an earthly paradise, in the gratification of the appetites of the flesh ; the Christian victor shall inherit the paradise of God, and shall eat of the tree of life in the midst thereof.
II I have a recollection of a book I read when a boy called Danesbury House. It was written in order to illustrate the value of temperance. Though it is forty years since I saw it, or read it, there is a scene in that book which has remained with me all my life. It describes one of the boys of the house who had become a victim of drink. By the grace of God he determined to break the habit and to overcome. The picture is given of the struggle in his room, of his turning to the Bible and opening at this text, " To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life." And the picture is drawn of that young man, broken by indulgence, his will weakened by drink, falling on his face and covering the Bible with his tears as he prayed to overcome. And the end of it was he did overcome, and became completely reclaimed. That has haunted me all my life. It seems to me that to overcome temptation, even one temptation, is to taste of the tree of life. To overcome all temptations is to eat of the tree and dwell in the paradise of God.^
I.
Access to the Tree of Life.
"The tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God."
1. The word " Paradise " has a curious history. Originally it was a name given to certain royal pleasure parks in which the sovereigns of ancient Persia took delight ; a vast tract of enclosed
1 R. F. Horton.
REVELATION ii. 7 63
country abounding in natural forest, timber as well as cultivated fruit trees ; a place half park, half orchard, with springs of clear water keeping cool the meadow-lands, as well as open glades for sport, with here and there a terraced garden gay with flowers. Such was the scene styled first a Paradise. The Hebrews learned the word through their captivity in the East, as the Greeks learned it a little later during the campaigns of Alexander; and when the Old Testament came to be translated into Greek it was by this borrowed name that scholars interpreted the ancient garden of God, which had been man's primeval seat in his golden age of innocence. Thus it became fairly naturalized among the Jews, and in our Lord's time it had come to be transferred from Eden to the site of that Hades where the disembodied spirits lived — the region where all the Jews were believed to await Messiah's coming In the New Testament the word " Paradise " is to be found only three times. Its first occurrence is in the great word of our Lord addressed to the penitent malefactor on the cross " To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." What the rude outlaw understood by the gracious words of his great Fellow-Sufferer that day could be nothing but this, that when death should release them both from their agony they should be received together among the righteous dead — he, undeserving child of Abraham, received beneath the favouring of Israel's martyred Christ and King. On each of the two other occasions in which the term " Paradise " occurs in the New Testament it is used in a new sense — to de- scribe the heaven of the Christian. The first time it recurs is where St. Paul is boasting of his rapture from earth to the immediate seat and vision of God — " caught up into Paradise " he writes, " and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." The last time the word occurs, which is in this text in Kevelafcion, it is again used as an equivalent for heaven — the final home of the beatified saints. Of this celestial Eden restored to men we have a description, very familiar to all of us, in the closing chapters of this same Apocalypse — a description which has coloured all the imagery of Christendom and its sacred songs.
That Eden of earth's sunrise cannot vie With Paradise beyond her sunset sky Hidden on high.
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Four rivers watered Eden in her bliss, But Paradise hath One which perfect is In sweetnesses.
Eden had gold, but Paradise hath gold Like unto glass of splendours manifold Tongue hath not told.