in its best form, is an unsafe guide. If it looks to the Lord indeed, it is safe; but if it looks anywhere else it is lost. And it does not look to the Lord except in the case when man is wholly above its influence.
We have seen how man departed from his first estate, and inclined to the selfhood. We have followed the allegory as it described the fact. We have found, also, that with his greater self-consciousness, he was still endowed with a principle of goodness and innocence. The woman became a symbol of this affection for the selfhood. A new title is used for man, meaning not mankind as Adam did, but man as distinguished from woman. And this term for man is a symbol of the intellectual nature. So the serpent first applied himself to the woman. In other words, the sensuous principle of the mind began its work upon the selfhood. Sensual and sophistical reasonings about spiritual things, began to be used in place of the celestial perceptions which once had sway; and they went direct to the proprium as the easiest thing to seduce. Perhaps there were in those days Tom Paines, Yoltaires, and Ingersolls to say to the proprium, "Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden," to insinuate a doubt whether the words of the Lord were true; whether the love-life was the best life; whether the Lord or self was the real
