The Garden of Eden (Doughty)/Chapter 7

by John Doughty

 

 

VII.

THE EXPULSION.

And the Lord God said. Behold, the man is become as one of us. to know good and evil: and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from, the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man.—Gen. iii. 22, 23.

HE expulsion from Eden, viewed in its mere surface sense, appears to have been a very arbitrary proceeding on the part of the Lord. Its cause seems to have been wholly inadequate, its consequences not legitimately growing out of the act, and the punishment out of all proportion to the crime.

Let us take a supposed case. A father places his child in a garden where there are two kinds of fruit, each of them tempting to the eye and giving outward evidence of being luscious to the taste. The child is informed—without a why or a wherefore, but on the impulse of a mere whim and as a test of his implicit obedience—that he may eat of the one kind of fruit and not of the other. The declared conditions or consequences are: if he obeys he shall live, if not he shall die. It is a severe test, and the punishment altogether disproportionate to the offence to which it is annexed. The child, weak and ignorant, overcome by curiosity and overpersuaded by foolish advisers, is led to believe that his father did not really mean what he said, and eats of the tree of which he is forbidden to eat. Then the parent, entirely forgetful of the penalty he had imposed for disobedience, does not cause the child to die, but banishes him from his presence forever, to get his education and his living as best he may. He is to receive no more love, no more sympathy, no sign or shadow of mercy, from him who too severely tested him, and who was bound by every human consideration to lead him with a loving hand into wiser ways, instead of casting him off in his weakness, ignorance and error.

What would we think of such a father? Would we not consider him unjust, inhuman, heartless? Even the law which is supposed to be devoid of sympathy and untempered by mercy, would compel the parent to step in and take his child in charge again. But the Lord is better than man, infinitely more kind, tender and loving. Would it be possible for Him to act toward his child in the way the letter of Genesis appears to teach? How could He who, in the tender language of the Psalmist, is described as "a God full of compassion and gracious, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy and truth," who is represented in the Gospel as being "kind even unto the unthankful and the evil"—how could He be unjust, arbitrary, or cruel, devoid of love or forgetful of mercy toward even the most rebellious of his children?

When, therefore, we so read or interpret this narrative, accepting the apparent for the real truth, we make a terrible mistake. We must not conclude with the infidel that God's Word is false. Rather let us conclude that we have been mistaken in our interpretation; that our education or understanding has been at fault; and let us seek for an interpretation that will justify the character of God, and in so doing elevate our own minds. In reading the written Word we shall always come nearer the truth by rejecting the natural and seeking the spiritual meaning. For to all utterances of divine inspiration, our Lord's words apply, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." And the apostlo spoke in harmony with the Master's words, when he said with reference to Scripture, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

We have come now to a point where we can clearly see this. In previous discourses we have treated this Eden history as an allegory of spiritual truth. We have looked beyond the letter; we have not impaired the beauty or force of the narrative by literal interpretations, but have tried to reproduce its inward spirit and fill it with vigorous life. We have not looked upon it as literal history, but have endeavored to quicken it with that spirit with which the Lord gave it forth. Contrast the spiritual truth thus taught in this history viewed as a parable, with the most unnatural ideas which have been drawm from it as a literal historic narrative. An all-wise Father has created an earth upon which He places the family of man. He has made these children of his, on a finite scale, an image and likeness of what He is infinitely. That is. He has made them beings of love, innocence and goodness, and capable of indefinite degrees of spiritual wisdom. It is his desire that they should pass from this world, prepared for angelic habitations, and live in the highest happiness forever. He, therefore, may be considered as speaking to mankind after this manner: You are human because you are free; and you are free moral agents because you are human. I cannot take away your freedom without reducing you to the grade of the beasts which perish. Now, I place before you heavenly food of every variety, the wisdom of a good life and the goodness of eternal wisdom; and partaking of the fruit of these, you will have eternal life. I am the source of all good. Draw your nourishment, your food for heart and mind, from me the great Tree of Life, and existence shall be to you exceeding blissful. Do this, and life is an Eden, a garden of joy to you; and Eden is the bliss of heavenly life. But I place before you also the fact, that the life of self and sense is misery, degradation and spiritual death. This is the forbidden tree. It is forbidden, not because I would deprive you of any true good or pleasure, but because this is evil and insanity and there is no good in it. I commend the heavenly fruit to you, because it nourishes the eternal life of your souls and places you in heaven forever. I forbid the fruit of self and sense, because it hinders your spiritual growth, makes you heirs of spiritual death, and unfits you for heaven.

The contrast between this view of the narrative which is its spirit, and the other which is its letter, is marked. The Father is no longer arbitrary or inhuman. He is tenderness exemplified. All is consonant with what our deepest readings of the Bible show his character to be. It is not the Lord who is tyrannical, but man who is willful; not the Lord in anger shutting man out from happiness, but man shutting himself out by his own willfulness. And all this, as we have seen, is told, and in no ambiguous manner, in the symbolic language of this ancient parable.

But it is said: "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden;" and, it is added: "So he drove out the man." This is the peculiar style of all divine writings. It is so given with a purpose. Some of the common expressions of our day are similarly fashioned and for the same purpose. The old sayings "The sun rises," and "The sun goes down," are familiar illustrations. These phrases have come down to us from a people whose system of astronomy was all false, and who believed that the sun literally moved around the earth in twenty-four hours; that at the end of each day it sunk below the horizon: and that at the end of each night it rose again on the eastern side. That is the appearance, but it is not the reality. We all now know that the earth revolves upon its own axis in the twenty-four hours, and turns us in its movement toward and away from the sun. Yet this language of appearance, in this and many other instances that might be mentioned, remains unchallenged. Children and ignorant people are permitted to use it with a mistaken idea attaching to it, because they could not understand the truth if explained to them. But the educated are in no wise deceived or misled thereby, using themselves the same expressions, with a full conception of the true doctrine which lies within or behind this language of appearance; and the same children who, as children, accepted the apparent for the genuine truth, slowly and unconsciously, through education, come at last to connect only the real truth with the same language. The language of appearance, so large an element in the formulated expressions of conversation, is adapted to children and adults, to the ignorant and wise. It is the highest conception, fallacious as it may be, of infantile innocence and ignorance; yet it is, to manhood and education, only the apparent form which clothes realities.

The Lord, in his dealings with men, follows what is sometimes termed the methods of nature. And what are the methods of nature but the Lord's own methods? The Bible was given to the Jews who were merely natural men incapable of spiritual ideas. It is read to-day by millions of merely natural men. It is and has been and will forever be read by countless generations of children. It is intended that the natural minded, the superstitious, the spiritually uneducated and children, shall abide in the appearance until they can accept the reality. It is better for them to believe that the Lord chastises, that He is angry with us when we do wrong, that He sends us to hell, that He deprives us of heaven, that He drives the disobedient out of Eden, than that they should not recognize Him at all. The appearance of truth in regard to God, is better than a denial of Him. An acknowledgment of Him in an erroneous way, is better than no acknowledgment. We ascend to the temple of wisdom by steps; and the lowest step, be it never so rugged or soiled by earthly dust, is a foothold by means of which we mount to the higher.

Our Lord recognizes this. Therefore the Bible is a series of parables replete with spiritual wisdom. Its seeming is for natural men and children. Its real spirit is for spiritual men and women, and those desiring to be spiritual. The child may say, "God punishes me if I am wicked;" the natural man may think that the Lord drives men out of Eden for their disobedience; but the higher thought sees in the phrase, "The Lord drove out the man," simply an expression of the consequences which inhere in his own act. Eden was innocence, love and true happiness. When man ceased to love, he was out of Eden; when he was no longer innocent, he was no longer in Eden; when he did not enjoy the love of the Lord, nor the purity of purpose, nor the peculiar happiness which constituted Eden, and of which the term itself was a synonym, then he left Eden. That is to say, as Eden is a state and not a place, his departure from that state, by the very act of departure, put him outside of the garden.

The natural sense reveals the Lord to natural men as the punisher of disobedience. The spiritual sense manifests, to those who think spiritually, the great law of the fall, as being in man's own departure from the true and good. Therefore the Lord drove out the man in the same sense that the sun sends darkness on the world. For as the earth rolls itself away from the sunlight and plunges us into darkness, so the mind turns itself away from the Lord and his influence, and in so doing goes forth from Eden. Thus was it, and thus only, that Adam or the world's first Church, and Eve or the selfhood to which that Church had become wedded, were driven from the garden. They went to no other natural place, they remained, as to natural locality, just where they were. But they fell or went into a lower state, a more and more sensual and selfish state, a state to which nothing celestial adhered, and which could not in any proper sense be called Eden; and in that state they remained.

Let us now glance at another law of Providence which is set forth under the correspondences in the parable. It seems strange to natural thought, that the reason given for man's being sent forth from the Garden of Eden was, "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." Was it not the very purpose of the Lord that he should eat of this sacred tree? Why then send him from the garden lest he should eat of it? The answer is found in the symbols already so often explained.

Eden is a state of love; a garden, a state of spiritual intelligence. The expression, Garden of Eden, is, however, used with a modified meaning according to the position in the parable in which it occurs. The primitive state of man was such, that his Garden of Eden was a spiritual intelligence evolved from his intense love of God. But when he fell from this high state, and became in love with self and the things of sense, he still retained much of his knowledge, yea, acknowledgment of spiritual things. So his Garden of Eden would now be an intelligence concerning spiritual things based upon what had been handed down from his forefathers, a tradition concerning the love state, but not an experience of it. For we must remember that we are tracing the spiritual fall of a race through its centuries of decadence. The present generation had much more of an intellectual assent than of an experimental knowledge of the wisdom of Eden.

But as we learn from various other portions of the Word, to acknowledge truth, and not to be in the effort to live in the light of the truth acknowledged, is profanation. It is more soul-destroying than any other state. To give a formal assent to spiritual truth without an inward acknowledgment, to have a parrot-like memory of phrases without an adequate conception of their meaning, and in neither case to live by them, is comparatively pardonable: no one can live up to what he 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 live hereafter and to all eternity the life of the proprium, which is that of spiritual death. For while to live refers to heavenly life when that is the subject treated of, it means infernal life, when the soul is driven forth from Eden.

Thus when the Lord said, "Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;" that is, when He, in his infinite knowledge, perceived that mankind had eaten of the forbidden fruit, and yet had retained their acknowledgment of the laws of heavenly life approved of the Lord and held by his angels (it is plural, "one of us"), then came into play one of the eternal provisions of Providence. That provision is, that when the human mind falls into spiritual degradation, it shall lose its power of seeing or understanding spiritual truth. To profane is to sink into the lowest depths of evil; to sin without profanation of the truth, is comparatively pardonable. This is in consonance with that teaching of our Lord, which savs: "That servant which knew his Lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." For the merciful Lord, rather than have willful disobedience, has so ordered the laws of mind, that the supreme love of self shall be attended by loss of the capacity to recognize the love of God; and that a purely sensuous life shall incapacitate one to perceive the light of heaven. We see the operations of this law all the world over. And now that man has gone forth from Eden, none are permitted to see the light except those who will endeavor to live by the light. In our present low condition we may fail to live in all respects as the truth requires. But this is not the unpardonable sin. If we want to get into the sunlight of the Lord, and to rise above our evils, knowledge is given us adapted to our states; and the wanting and seeking is a sign that at some time we shall gain what we desire.

So, as the Eden of love faded from the hearts of men, the light of spiritual intelligence flickered in its departing struggle, and at last went out. Then the garden state was gone. And forth from the garden of Eden—forth from love and even spiritual knowledge—our early progenitors went. They went forth to "till the ground"—to cultivate the lowest part of their nature; "to till the ground from whence they were taken," to cultivate the sensuous plane on which the race was originally born, but from which untainted as yet by hereditary evil, the Lord had raised them into Eden.

But the Spirit of the Lord is ever operating for the salvation of man. There is no state of the heart into which it may not enter if man will permit it. To him who looks to the Lord, the light again comes. The more he looks to the Lord, the larger will become his intelligence. But the full comprehension of divine truths, the living perception which renders them certain and gives us an unquestioning possession of them, lies in the love and life of them.

It is well for us to think of this portion of Scripture as something more, even in its symbols, than a historical description of the first dwellers on earth. We lose the best part of it, unless we take it all home. We have hearts and understandings as well as they of old. We have our Eden, our tree of life, our forbidden fruit, as well as they. We, too, incline to self and are tempted to our fall. Our Eden, however, is our infancy. Then the best of the Lord's angels are around and near us, and we are guileless, pure and innocent. It is a different condition from that of the most ancient Church; still it is our Eden. As we grow older we incline to self. The hereditary proclivity is strong, and we lean to our corrupt inheritance. We incline to be wedded more and more to the proprium or selfhood, and take to ourselves some Eve of selfish affection in a thousand different ways. The serpent comes to us, and we listen to his subtle arguments, and yield our reason to his seductive allurements. The history of all hearts is substantially the same. 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 therein of our own changes and chances, and to gain therein the help of the Lord and his angels, to arise like the prodigal and return to the soul's true home—the garden of the Lord.