iving to reconstruct some sort of style that shall be
able to express poetical and religious ideas, especially in our church
decorations. At any rate, it must be of some use to understand the
hidden springs which once raised ecclesiastical embroideries, and
especially those of England, so high as objects of beauty, worthy to
adorn the house of God, and to be for centuries valued as monuments of
pious industry and thoughtful art.

One of these hidden springs and ancient underlying motives was the
symbolism which gave a religious intention to the smallest design for
the humblest use, provided that its purpose was the service of the
Church.

Sacred symbolism is a subject to which I have alluded more than once;
and it has played such an important part in the construction and
growth of ecclesiastical art, that I cannot but give a short notice to
the subject under this aspect.

Symbolism in art is what metaphor is in speech. It is the
representation to the eye of an object which suggests something else
besides itself.

Dr. Rock tells us that the symbolism of Scripture texts was given to
the world in a book by St. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, A.D. 170. Its
title is "The Key."[537] In the fourth century were produced two great
works on Scriptural symbols, that of St. Basil in his homilies on the
six days of the creation, and that by St. Ambrose; both entitled
Hexameron.

We meet this subject at every turn in the succeeding centuries,
till in the twelfth we find it formulated and divided into
branches--Bestiaria, Volucraria, and Lapidaria--and each type had
frequently more than one meaning. Thus a lion represented power,
sovereignty, dominion; also the "House of Judah;" a hare the emblem
of man's soul; a peacock that of wisdom (many-eyed). The ruby
represents love. The pearl, innocence. The twelve stones in a
breastplate, the twelve tribes of Israel.[538] Trees and flowers had
also their symbolical meanings, though we are not aware of their
being recorded in any mediaeval book. We know that the vine is the
tree of life; the stem of Jesse, the sacramental emblem; that the
lily stands for purity, the woodbine for chastity, and the rose for
religious ecstasy. The crowned lily was always the special emblem of
the Virgin.

These symbols had many of them a distant source, and had been, as I
have already indicated, emblematic of other inner meanings in the
expression of pagan faiths. The tree of life was Babylonian; the horn,
Pe