Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/123

Rh 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