Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/104

98 countenance! But you have seen, perhaps, those mirrors which turn the human figure upside down, or distort every feature of the face. The original is perfect enough; it is the reflection: which is right or wrong. The divine original in the soul of man, is pure and upright. It is the use we make of our God-given faculties—the manner in which the soul receives and reflects the influent life, which renders it beautiful or monstrous in its proportion and form.

Life given of the Lord, is a blessing to him who uses it aright, and a curse to him who perverts it. This is the blessing and the curse. It seems as if the latter were of God, and the natural mind so views it. It really is of man; and the spiritual mind reads of God's curse, as the poet reads of the angry sun. Each one reads according to his nature. But he who follows the Word of God in its spirit, thinks of the curse of the Lord as the angels think of it—as the divine mercy resting with man amid the very ruins of his nature, and rendering him as happy as possible in the dreary region of life he has sought and found. In other words, God's curse is the divine law of life—a ruin and a wreck through man's perversity, but Divinity still working amid those ruins to save him from a worse desolation even on his chosen plane. Riches are a blessing to him who uses them aright, a curse to him who makes of them the mere