Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/93

Rh Lord did not desire man's spiritual death. He would not have him rest in mere worldly joys when there is a higher life; nor live merely for self when the well-being of his kind demands his services; nor study only his interest in this world, when there is an eternal world for which he was placed here to prepare. He would not have him shrivel his faculties, when they were made for wide expansion; nor invert the law of life when he is capable of enjoying its unspeakable blessings; nor become a creature of disorder and selfishness, when he was created in the grandest order and for the highest use. He would not have him confine his aims and ends to the body and this world, nor his reasoning faculties to natural science, when by doing so he loses the higher wisdom and fails to attain the higher and purer life. He would not have him wallow in the filthy mire of sensuous delights, when there are sweet fields of heavenly joy wherein to live and take pleasure. He would not have him a mere animal, when He had created him to be an angel. For as the fruit of the tree of life was goodness and wisdom, the fruit of the tree of knowledge was evil and error, crime and insanity. Therefore was it that the Lord commanded man not to eat of this, the forbidden fruit. God is not possessed of the human passion of pride. He did not utter an arbitrary edict for the sake of enjoying man's servile