and his love perceived as the soul's inmost life, the tree of knowledge, the life of self and sense forbidden and as yet unknown, the woman mast be symbolic also. What was her spiritual meaning, and what the part she bore in this history of a celestial state and its final loss? For we must remember that Adam was a people, race, or Church. Adam was male and female. The woman, therefore, could not have been the wife of Adam as a man masculine, but must signify something that was adjoined or added to a whole people, after they had for indefinite ages enjoyed this state of love and innocence. As Eden, the garden, the rivers, and the gold, are all of the mind, so must the woman be also. She must be some principle or attribute which man had not possessed before.
Now, what is woman as a representative character, whether in the world, in tradition, or in the Word of God? Clearly she is the embodiment of that principle of the soul denominated affection. In all mythology, in all the symbolic poetry of the older times, in all the traditions of the ages, when love, devotion, religion—any tender sentiment of heart or grace of spirit which was born of gentle affections—was symbolized, delineated, mythologically embodied, painted, or sculptured, it was always under the form of woman. We know that the world now is pretty well upside
