Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/27

Rh him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it."

Adam, then, is a collective noun. Adam was created male and female; and there were a number of them, for the term them certainly means more than one. Adam was the primitive race. He was placed in Eden, not as a single man in a solitary garden, but as a race of men originally brought into the kingdom of God. His state or condition was called Eden, because he was loving and therefore happy; a garden, because he was truly intelligent and spiritually wise. Adam (that is, the human race) would be in Eden today, if all men loved the Lord supremely, and perceived and appreciated the heavenly intelligence with which their Maker seeks to endow them.

The history of Eden is, therefore, an account, in allegorical form, of the spiritual condition of the early inhabitants of earth. Each word in the narrative is a symbol, and a perfect one. Inconsistencies in the letter disappear when their spiritual meaning is discerned.

Briefly let us glance at a few of the attributes of this wonderful garden. It was planted eastward in Eden. In sacred symbolism the east is where the Lord is. Spiritually, we are looking