Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/87

Rh and true? Why forbid themselves anything that came from so divine a source? This was sophistry, the serpent's cunning, in its most unadulterated form. Without mentioning the tree of knowledge, this reasoning included it—evidently insinuating that it also must be good, because it was one of the trees of Eden. Eden was all good, how could any of its trees be bad? The Eden state was all purity, how could any perception of the mind be false? Follow this new dictate, was the insinuation; it is of Eden in the heart, and it is therefore right.

But the selfhood was not immediately satisfied. It had been endowed by the Lord with spiritual life; it had been elevated into spiritual atmospheres; and even the self-consciousness, in its higher state, was not so easily convinced. So the woman's answer to the serpent's delusive insinuation was: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." It was evident that of all the trees of the garden they might eat, with this single exception. All perceptions of the mind were from the Lord; all that belonged to the Eden state and was rooted in its soil—perceptions of truth, of good, of love, of God, and whatsoever intelligence sprang from them—all these Rh