Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/90

84 and what is falsity, with the serpent as chief pleader and the selfhood as umpire, spiritual truth has no chance of acceptance. And when human reason is, under the same conditions, the arbiter of good and evil, good becomes whatever panders to the pleasure, profit and aggrandizement of one's self, and evil whatever is in opposition thereto. Each man is a god unto himself; each man decides for himself; each man is self-glorified. This was the tendency with our early progenitors. The serpent that now holds high carnival in the world, was then exerting his most seductive influence.

We have considered the tree of life as the Lord and his love, and the tree of knowledge, as self and science. Eating of the one or the other symbolizes appropriating the one or the other of these principles to the life of the soul. We know that natural eating is for the sustenance and invigoration of the natural body. The food, or the life-giving elements of the food, are conveyed by the blood to the various organs of the system, and distributed according to the needs of this or that portion of the body. Its many parts, the brain, the muscle, the flesh, the bone, the nervous fluid, the cuticle, each and all partake of the blessings and the benefits. And the body lives and grows and strengthens by means of the food whereof it partakes; and the condition of the body, whether