does not intelligently comprehend. But to receive God's law intelligently, and deliberately break it—to accept in the understanding the law of love, and make no effort to bring it forth into life—demoralizes the soul and is spiritually ruinous. Better ignorance, better utter darkness, better anything that sins in blindness and perverts the Lord's law with no knowledge of its existence, than an intelligent conception of its behests and a willful violation of them. By a willful violation, I do not mean the slips which the carnal man is always liable to make, but the deliberate sinning from the pure love of sin, and without an effort to overcome, while the man interiorly acknowledges the true nature of the higher life.
Therefore it was according to the Lord's providence that man should entirely lose his intelligence concerning spiritual things, rather than acknowledge and profane them; that he should not only go forth from Eden, or the love state, since so he would, but that he should also be driven out from the garden—the spiritually intelligent state. The hand is a symbol of power, as it is man's chief agent in performing the behests of his will. To put forth the hand, here means to exert the intellectual powers of the mind. To take of the tree of life, is to acknowledge the doctrine of love, and the Lord as its source. To eat is mentally to digest and confirm it. And to live forever, is to
