Manhood or womanhood finds us infatuated with the serpent. We are driven out of Eden. Yet there is this to console us, that so long as we live on earth we are privileged to return.
It is for the purpose of reading our own heart-histories, that these parables are valuable. For that, they are of inestimable worth; but they are valueless to us in the degree they fail of that. For in these chapters, whatever they may tell of the olden times, our hearts are also laid bare for our own inspection. When we read them for spiritual instruction, angels quicken us to love them. They infuse the desire to shun the wrong and do the right. Thus we come into communion with angelic minds; we breathe in some degree the atmosphere of heaven; we fall in some measure under the influence thus infused; we grow better and wiser; we gain more light and life; and this divine Word shall do more for us, as we better comprehend its spirit and meaning, than men in the past have, in their most hopeful states, dreamed of. If we love this Word, let us not imagine that we may safely be indifferent to its higher purpose. If we reverence it, let us not be content with its lower or sensuous meaning. If we have caught one glimpse of its heavenly spirit, let us take it to our hearts and fill our souls with its delights, and in its every utterance try—as we are trying in this history of the planting and loss of Eden—to read
