Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/125

Rh 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