John Doughty

“ There is only one tree whose fruit is life, for us as well as for our early progenitors. It is the Lord himself enthroned within the heart. It is that principle of love, so large, so all-embracing, so divine, that the mind of its possessor is an Eden of intelligence and delight. Its branches are far reaching; its roots strike deep; its fruits are all goodness and wisdom, and they nourish the soul from its centers of affection and thought to its extremities of active life and work. Other trees there are in the garden which contribute to life ”

“ It does not ask you to be ever dreaming to the neglect of your work, or ever ecstatic to the point of forgetting that you live in the world for the world. But I do mean that you will feel the Lord as you linger amid his blessings just as you know the presence of the sunlight as you walk the ways of earth, just as you realize the moon and stars as above you when by their radiance you travel the paths of night, just as you revel in the perfume of the flowers or the new mown hay, when you pass through gardens or meadows. ”

“ I am the source of all good. Draw your nourishment, your food for heart and mind, from me the great Tree of Life, and existence shall be to you exceeding blissful. Do this, and life is an Eden, a garden of joy to you; and Eden is the bliss of heavenly life. But I place before you also the fact, that the life of self and sense is misery, degradation and spiritual death. ”

“ But now this love and faith are enkindled within the spiritual mind, and even our knowledge of eternal things are lit with living fire.
And so these lights enkindled thus serve to divide between the day and night—between the light of the true and good and the darkness of the false and evil. Error can no more deceive us; evil can no more palm itself off for good, nor selfishness for virtue. These clear-shining luminaries, love, the greater light for the day, faith the lesser light for the night, have dispelled all misconceptions. ”

“ Life becomes love in its highest sense, and the joy of existence a thing unutterable!
But the tree of knowledge is self and science. Its fruit is error and falsity, evil and crime. We throw aside revelation; we deny its truth; we divorce our understanding from its fountain of wisdom; and we say. Let us rely on science or the senses. We read no more the commandments of God; we relegate those precepts to the realm of the impracticable; we grow indifferent to the voice of the Lord as it fain would speak to us in the garden of the mind ”

“ And as age succeeds age a ceaseless procession of human souls is passing from every earth of this immeasurable universe of planetary spheres into the infinite world beyond. The grandeur of the thought is overwhelming. And in every time of illimitable space and in every state of each one's life in all these worlds, into the universe of nature and into that of spirit, these Divine activities are flowing, creating, sustaining, developing, recreating.
God is, therefore, not a self-glorifying Being. His happiness is in his goings forth for others, not in the contemplation of his own greatness. ”

“ It is for man wisely to use this gift of freedom. It is for him to love and live, not to center his soul on self and die. We are inheritors of this destiny. Let us heed the lesson well, ponder its great privileges, appreciate its divine excellence, admire its tribute to our heaven-born powers, cling to the tree of life, and win the Eden which awaits all open, receptive and obedient souls. ”

“ There is a state of mind where error is as easily recognized as the baleful shadow of the night, and truth as easily seen as the light in its summer shining; where evil is as sensitively recognized as the cold of the polar zone, and good as exquisitely percieved as the sweet, soft airs of a perfect spring. To cultivate this is the object of regeneration. No excellence in the whole realm of existence is obtained without cultivation. Full regeneration, the seventh day of the new creation, is the perfection of the spiritual nature. Truth is then a perception, good an intuition. ”

“ It is he, the entire works of whose life are the fruits of love—of that love whose center and source is the Lord; of love which is all-embracing in its character; of love which is holy, pure, unselfish, overflowing with benevolence to all mankind.
Such a tree when planted in the heart, "yields its fruit every month;" because the Lord's love, when it is the soul's animating principle, produces works that are genuinely good in every changing state. "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." ”

“ And the life that man has lived, may be lived by man again. We may all dwell in Eden; and the narrative of the garden of spiritual joy, stands as a hope, a promise, a spiritual prophecy of what may again be realized here on earth.
May the time speed on when Christianity shall find its Eden once more, where the sole delight shall be—with love that shall never weary and wisdom that will not die—to dress and keep, in its eternal beauty, that sacred garden of the Lord! ”

“ Faith alone, faith which has not borrowed its light from love, cannot do this. But a faith that is the reflection of genuine love once ours, cannot by any possibility fail us.
So, when this belief in God which is born of love has power to sustain us amid our night-times of life, the lesser light, the moon of faith, begins to shine upon us with its silvery radiance. Set up within the spiritual region of the mind, it sheds light upon our darkness, illumines our farthest pathways, saves us from snares and pitfalls, and carries us safely on to another state of newly awakened day. ”

“ Eden is the state of peace, innocence and joy with which the soul is suffused, and which it carries with it in all the circumstances and vicissitudes of life, in all its labors and burdens, in all its duties and amusements. But the tree of life is that love as the fountain within the heart whence spring the spirit of goodness and purity of motive which give the life this state and tone. ”

“ But is there any conscious thought as we see, and walk, and work amid them all, that the Lord's never ceasing inflow of Divine life is pushing up the grass on which we tread, is painting the blossoms with the pure white or flaming red, with gold or azure blue, is pouring the juicy current into the hanging fruit, or is making the world radiant with the light which illumines our daily walk? ”

“ The moon shines by reflected light, while the sun is light and heat in itself. The faith of the mind is true and bright only as it is reflected from love—only as it is a response to the deep love of the heart. The moon's light is borrowed from the sun. Sunlight, therefore, is the great natural power of life and growth which broods upon the face of the earth. Moonlight has very little to do with covering the land with corn, with filling the gardens with flowers, or with loading the trees with fruit. The moon without the sun would have neither light nor life. Faith without love is cold and dead. ”

“ There is the Tree of Life, the Lord our love; there are its fruits of every hue; there are its leaves for the whole world's healing. And they are all parts of a heavenly whole. They are all divine. We can spare no portion of them. Doctrine is for our teaching; but we are taught it that we may live it. Truth is for our enlightenment; but it becomes our condemnation if we fail to walk in the light of it. It is only by living or doing as the truth requires, that our hearts are opened to the reception of the fruit of that immortal tree which is forever in the midst of the paradise of God. ”

“ The fish of the sea are the knowledges in the memory, the fowl of the air the thoughts which float through the atmosphere of the mind, the cattle the affections of the heart, all the earth the entire realm of mind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, the instincts and ideas that lay close to the earth in the very natural duties and pleasures which a life in the world compel us to perform and enjoy. These are the things over which the man, the regenerated manhood, are to have and hold dominion. ”

“ How soon its cankering cares were gone, how far its shadows sent away, how dried of tears its weeping eyes, how soothed to smiles its face of sorrow, were it only freed from this constant sense of self! Could we not be ourselves, yet live for others? Could we not consciously receive the beautiful life of the Lord, yet pour it ever forth into the hearts of those around us? ”

“ No pent of fires of self-satisfied glory burn within his soul. All He is goes forth. He creates worlds; his ceaseless going forth of life sustains them. Creation never stops. In a single world once made, it is seed-time and harvest forever, an endless succession of efforts on the part of the Divine energies for the benefit of man. He creates man; and again it is a ceaseless working on the spiritual plane of his being for his constant elevation. He not only forms the world of nature and man as a physical being, but He forms the world of souls and man as a spiritual being. ”

“ The woman, therefore, could not have been the wife of Adam as a man masculine, but must signify something that was adjoined or added to a whole people, after they had for indefinite ages enjoyed this state of love and innocence. As Eden, the garden, the rivers, and the gold, are all of the mind, so must the woman be also. She must be some principle or attribute which man had not possessed before.
Now, what is woman as a representative character, whether in the world, in tradition, or in the Word of God? Clearly she is the embodiment of that principle of the soul denominated affection. ”

“ It can neither warm the heart, enlighten the mind, nor give salvation to the man. But faith that is kindled at the shrine of the heart's best love, faith which borrows its light from love, faith which reflects the sunny glow of the heart's true love on every pathway of life—that is at once the sign and seal of a soul that is saved. ”

“ He tries to turn our errors into wise and useful lessons. If we sink into self, He follows us with healing balms for every wound. If we sink beyond recall. He softens even the saddest fall. If we rise toward heaven. He bears us up with tender hands. If we throw ourselves into his loving arms, He will hold us there forever. The cherubim spread their broad protecting wings over all, and even the flame of the turning sword has its lesson of love. ”

“ Spiritual knowledge becomes thus no irrational faith, no unformed scheme, no vapid array of meaningless phrases, but a grand scheme of spiritual philosophy, complete in all its parts, beautiful in its symmetry, spiritually approved by the reason of man, and worthy of God. The leviathans of the mind, its grand conclusions, its large and fully rounded philosophy, always come last. The more alive our truths are the grander they become in character and scope. Not until we enter into living relations with God, do the truth-waters of the soul bring forth their leviathans of thought. ”

“ It drowns the soul in dissipation or overwhelms it in pleasures; it elates it with ambition; it makes it in dreams a demi-god. It puts self in the center of its little universe, and causes all things to revolve around it. It bends all activities, all beings, all life, to serve one's personal ends, whether of ambition, pleasure or greed. And what is worse than all, it persuades the soul that this is the only right and proper thing to do, that it has the sanction of religion, and that anything else is superstition. This serpent is the deluding principle of the universe. ”

“ So in matters which concern our spiritual walk, where neither love nor faith shine on our wandering way to guide our devious steps, the stars of the mere knowledge of what is true and good may afford some glimmering light to help us on. Thus, as in the absence of sun and moon, night may still have its stars, comparatively dim though their light may be, so, though our love may, for the time, be cold, and our faith may halt, the bare knowledge of what is true and good will serve a purpose in our lives, until our faith and love assert themselves once more. ”

“ The river of Eden and the river of the New Jerusalem are one. The spirit of wisdom, its fountain-head being the Lord, proceeds from the love of spiritual things within the mind, and the delight in pursuing them. Without a love for it and a delight in its pursuit, there is no wisdom of any kind. Hence the river went forth from Eden—wisdom springing from love and its delight. And it went forth to water the garden, or to give life and vigor to human intelligence. ”

“ A day, in scripture symbolism, is a state of mind. This evening and this morning, this first breaking of the spiritual light upon the mind's dark earth, in its beginning shadowy, in its progressions brighter, constitutes with every one his first state of regeneration.
How true this is. All mental progress is from darkness into light; all spiritual progress, from evening unto morning. It matters not that the light now is but a dim glimmering in comparison with what it may be. All success proceeds from first steps; all achievements begin at the beginning. ”

“ The origin of evil is still in every soul, the whispering of the serpent to the woman. Self-consciousness is to most people their very life. Our love of sensuous things drags us down to the lowest levels. If we deny God and immortality, it is the delusion of sense. If we hesitate or doubt, it is the delusion of sense. If we cannot grasp spiritual thoughts, it is because we are deluded by sense. If we cannot open our understandings to the light that comes only from on high, it is sense that hinders. And through all our denials and doubts, it is sense and its delusions that rule the soul. ”

“ Can the poet's sensibility detect a flaw in the rhythmic measure of a line, the artist's eye descry the untrue in the drawing of a picture, the musician's ear discover the slightest deviation from exact harmony in a band of a hundred pieces, and this by the intuition of a moment, and the spiritual nature have no instant intuitions of its own—no ear for the true, no sense for the good, that is as undeviating as the lines of light? But, you say, the intuition of the poet, the artist, or the musician comes by cultivation. ”