fruit of the tree of life is all the goodness and wisdom which we receive from the Lord—humbly acknowledging that it is his and not our own—and appropriate to the upbuilding and sustenance of the soul. Eat we of the fruit of that tree, and its life-giving principles flow down into every least thing of the spirit. They give light to the understanding, purity to the desire, sweetness to the affections, wisdom to the thought; they go down into the labors and works of the hands, and spiritualize every least act of life. They nourish, invigorate, sustain and build up the spiritual man into a glorious image and likeness of God. Life becomes love in its highest sense, and the joy of existence a thing unutterable!
But the tree of knowledge is self and science. Its fruit is error and falsity, evil and crime. We throw aside revelation; we deny its truth; we divorce our understanding from its fountain of wisdom; and we say. Let us rely on science or the senses. We read no more the commandments of God; we relegate those precepts to the realm of the impracticable; we grow indifferent to the voice of the Lord as it fain would speak to us in the garden of the mind; and we say, Let us consider self-preservation, and the wealth, honors and pleasures of the world, as the things most near at hand and of most immediate need. Then we eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree. The
