But the Church grudged Venus the flower. Roses, said Wilfred Strabo, were the flower of martyrdom. ‘_Rosæ martyres, rubore sanguinis_,’ wrote Saint Melitus, Bishop of Sardes, in the second century, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux found the rose to be a fitting symbol of the Passion of our Lord. But though the rose was red to the colour of blood, and fenced around with cruellest thorns, it had been so long associated with the joys of life that the world refused to recognize it as the flower of death. Only as the sign of the triumphant entry of the departed soul to Heaven was the symbol acceptable. Roses sprang from the blood of those who fell for their faith at Roncevaux (as indeed they sprang from the spilt blood of Adonis), but they were also the sign of victory over the pagan, and when the Virgin Mary was laid within her tomb it was in rejoicing that ‘straightway there surrounded her flowers of roses which are the blessed company of martyrs.’[55] But the Church, always wise in matters æsthetic, did not insist upon the tragic significance of the rose. It was allowed to be still the symbol of love, but of divine love, and it is as the symbol of the love of God that it now decorates our churches in carvings of wood or stone, in the silver work of church ornaments and on embroidered vestments and altar frontals. The rose has never been especially associated with the person of Christ. Origen, who held that the text which we render, ‘I am the rose of Sharon,’ was a self-description of our Lord, read the verse, ‘I am the flower of the field,’ so giving the Church no clear image. When in art an emblem was required to represent our Lord, the ancient catacomb devices of the lamb and the vine were employed. Any reference to Him under the metaphor of a flower was rare and usually vague, as the charming ‘gold flower’ of the Blickling Homilies. ‘Then the Queen of all the maidens gave birth to the true Creator and Consoler of mankind, when the gold-flower came unto this world and received a human body from S. Mary, the spotless Virgin.’ Or again as a fruit rising from the mystical rose: ‘Now spring up flouris fra the rute Revert you upward naturally In honour of the blissit frute That raiss up fro the rose Mary.’[56] There are some mediæval Latin hymns for the Nativity in which Christ is referred to as the rose springing from the lily. The simile, however, was by no means applied to Him exclusively, for in a Visitation hymn of the same period He is alluded to as the lily hidden in the rose. But though the rose is not often the emblem of Jesus Christ, both in literature and art it is used as the symbol of His love.