The tonsure was originally instituted to keep fresh in the memory the Saviour’s Crown of Thorns. And in the ‘Paradise’ of Fra Angelico[144] the monks are crowned with roses. Thus the emblem reverted to the original symbol. The Crown of Thorns was the parody of the rose-crown, symbol of rejoicing; the tonsure the reverent imitation of the thorny wreath, and angels at the entrance of Paradise change the tonsure for a wreath of roses. In early German art the Virgin is often found seated in a garden of which each flower has its significance. Behind and around her there is usually a sort of trellis or bower covered with roses. The roses have very pronounced thorns, and the thorns are accentuated to recall that Mary is the lily and the bride of the Canticles, the ‘Lily among thorns.’ In an Assumption of Seghers[145] one of the attendant _putti_ flies towards her with a single lily enclosed in branches covered with long-spiked thorns. On the other hand, when the rose is the direct emblem, not the attribute of the Madonna, it has no thorns, for then it illustrates her title, ‘_rosa sine spina_.’ The Roman Breviary likens the Virgin to the burning thorn bush in which Jehovah revealed Himself to Moses and the simile was cited by Bishop Proclus in a Mary-sermon preached in the fifth century. Though enwrapped in the all-consuming flame of divine love, she yet remains unharmed. It is only in German art that this simile has been pictorially translated. German artists were familiar with the idea through Conrad von Würtzburg’s apostrophe to the Virgin: ‘In the thorn bush on the bare field Moses, the hero of God Saw in a glow of bright fire The birth of our Saviour foreshadowed. In the blast of the flame It remained unaltered As if neither leaf nor twig Perceived the death-giving blaze. In this we may recognize The full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’[146] And we find this burning Thorn Bush with the Ivory Tower, the Sealed Fountain, the Fleece of Gideon and other emblems of the Virgin, in the fifteenth-century renderings of the _Hortus Inclusus_ and in the background of the essentially German allegory of the Incarnation, known as the ‘Hunting of the Unicorn.’ There are some fine embroideries and tapestries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Bavarian National Museum,[147] in which the burning thorn bush, with the other symbols of the Virgin’s purity, are worked with most careful detail. The burning bush, not particularly a thorn bush, but the ‘bush’ of our Authorized Version, is now the chosen emblem of the Church of Scotland.