Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/147



S the Word of God, in recording the spiritual history of man, begins by placing him in the Garden of Eden, so it ends by restoring him to that beautiful dwelling-place from whence, through sin, he was driven. Eden is the first blessing and the last promise which the Lord offers to man. It is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, of the divine alphabet of human holiness. It embraces all things delightful and pleasant, all things wise and true, all things loving and good, all things innocent and pure. But as the Lord looks especially to man's eternal good and not to his temporal success—to that other world which is spiritual and whose joys are unending, and not to this which Rh