THE DOVE OF PEACE 



" On the seventh day in the course of it I sent forth a dove, and it left. 

 The dove went and turned. A resting place it did not find : it returned." — 

 Chaldean Account or Creation. 



" He sent forth a dove from him to see ir the waters were abated from oft' 

 the face of the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot 

 and she returned to him into the ark .... and he stayed yet other seven 

 days and again he sent forth the dove from the ark. And the dove came into 

 him in the evening, and !o ! in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off." — 

 Genesis viii. 



" And the Holy Ghost descended in bodily shape like a dove." — Luke Hi. 



" Arise my mother ! my dove ! " — C/iristus in the Legenda Aurea De : 

 yfss : Beata vir : Maria. 



HE dove has from the beginning of Time been 

 associated with a message of Peace. It is 

 found first in the hands of the Great Mother, 

 lineal ancestress of Ishtar, Astarte, Semiramis 

 — and later on with a very different pur- 

 pose in those of Venus, the Goddess of Love. 

 And everywhere it is associated also with water, with 

 some promise of an ark ; that is, of safety. In the old 

 Egyptian planispheres, those quaint records of man's 

 earliest conception of the earth on which he dwelt, of 

 the heavens above him and the waters beneath him, the 

 Dove of the Deluge, with the leaf in its beak, is found 

 winging its way across the dry month of the Archer. 



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