Saint Dominic almost always carries a lily. Saint Francis was sufficiently distinguished by the stigmata, Saint Benedict by the chalice; but Saint Dominic has a lily white as the austerity of his faith. Saint Anthony of Padua is to-day the most popular of all the monastic saints. His sane and gentle piety and his reputation for granting little ordinary boons has endeared him to simple folk. There seems no particular reason why he, above other saintly monks, should be so distinguished, but when he is not represented with the Infant Christ in his arms he invariably has a lily. In the very beautiful ‘Vision of Saint Anthony,’ by Murillo,[298] where the Holy Child appears in a ray of light, a vase of lilies stands upon the table. In another picture, by Annibale Caracci, the Child-Christ Himself holds the lily. Another bearer of the lily is he ‘Whom Mary’s charms Embellish’d, as the sun the morning star’-- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Though opposing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, he had a very special devotion to the Mother of Christ. Many of his sermons, called by Henault _Chefs d’œuvre de sentiment et de force_, celebrate her perfections, and, in particular, the famous series of sermons upon the Bride of the Song of Solomon. It is said that it was his love for the ‘lily of the valleys’ which so impressed the lily form upon the architecture of his order, for again and again in the Gothic stone-work of the Cistercian abbeys ‘lily work’ is found. The lily, it may be remarked, is given to those saints in holy orders who were pious from their earliest youth and not to those who had passed a gay time in the world before conversion. XIX THE VINE The principal of the allegorical fruits is the vine. It is one of the most ancient emblems of Christ, and is founded upon His own words, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ It is seen in the Catacombs, on early Christian sarcophagi, and in the early mosaics, always as the emblem of Christ or of His Church. A fruiting vine very beautifully expresses a perfect life rich with the fruits of the spirit, and even were the analogy not suggested by Christ’s own words, it is possible that Christians would have seen in the tree whence comes the sacramental wine, emblem of the holy blood, a likeness to Him who shed that blood. Where the cross, the sacred monogram or the figure of Christ Himself is introduced, the vine takes a secondary place as emblem of the Christian Church, and taken in this sense the symbolism admits of some complication, twelve bunches of grapes typifying the twelve Apostles, and birds among the branches Christian souls.