Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/94

88. He did not make life and happiness to depend on refraining from a certain natural fruit. It is only sensuous thought that so drags the Lord down to the level of human frailty. He commanded man not to live from self, not to draw his mental food from sensuous science, not to place his life in mere knowledge; because, if he did, his spiritual nature would die. What He commanded was solely for man's own happiness and good.

But man ate. He no longer looked to the Lord for the food of his soul, but to self. He lost sight of those words of divine beauty, "He that eateth me, even he shall live by me;" and he made a god of himself instead, and recognized no other source of life. This food he ate, or appropriated as the life of his soul. With this he nourished all his faculties. It went through his whole system; it permeated his whole character; it poisoned his affections; it darkened his understanding; it nourished hatreds, cruelties and revenges; it rendered him incapable of spiritual perception; it capacitated him for crime; and it flung the world, as its final outcome, into that seething cauldron of misery, war and unrest, which is so largely our lot to-day. And so will the world remain until we cease to eat of the forbidden fruit, the source of all our woe, and return to Eden and the Lord.

There is an expression introduced into the third chapter of Genesis, which seems contradictory of