Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/554

538 Love infinitely wise and altogether lovely, who “seeketh not her own.”

Truth should, and does, drive error out of all selfhood. Truth is a two-edged sword, guarding and guiding.

Truth places the cherub wisdom at the gate of understanding to note the proper guests. Radiant with mercy and justice, the sword of Truth gleams afar and indicates the infinite distance between Truth and error, between the material and spiritual, — the unreal and the real.

The sun, giving light and heat to the earth, is a figure of divine Life and Love, enlightening and sustaining the

universe. The “tree of life” is significant of eternal reality or being. The “tree of knowledge” typifies unreality. The testimony of the serpent is significant of the illusion of error, of the false claims that misrepresent God, good. Sin, sickness, and death have is no record in the Elohistic introduction of Genesis, in which God creates the heavens, earth, and man. Until that which contradicts the truth of being enters into the arena, evil has no history, and evil is brought into view only as the unreal in contradistinction to the real and eternal.

This account is given, not of immortal man, but of mortal man, and of sin which is temporal. As both mortal

man and sin have a beginning, they must consequently have an end, while the sinless, real man is eternal. Eve's declaration, “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” supposes God to be the author