John Doughty

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the Lord is better than man, infinitely more kind, tender and loving. Would it be possible for Him to act toward his child in the way the letter of Genesis appears to teach? How could He who, in the tender language of the Psalmist, is described as "a God full of compassion and gracious, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy and truth," who is represented in the Gospel as being "kind even unto the unthankful and the evil"—how could He be unjust, arbitrary, or cruel, devoid of love or forgetful of mercy toward even the most rebellious of his children? ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the sun, the earth blossoms as a rose; without the sun it were a desert. With the Lord, man's mind is a Garden of Eden; without Him it is a wilderness of self, sensuality and sin. Therefore it was a beautiful thing when man lived in the sunlight of the conscious presence of the Lord; it was a sad step when he descended into his selfhood or proprium. When this affection for proprium was added to his Eden life—when the woman, by his own desire, was brought to the man, it was a step downward.
This state of decline is represented by the deep sleep which fell upon Adam. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eat we of the fruit of that tree, and its life-giving principles flow down into every least thing of the spirit. They give light to the understanding, purity to the desire, sweetness to the affections, wisdom to the thought; they go down into the labors and works of the hands, and spiritualize every least act of life. They nourish, invigorate, sustain and build up the spiritual man into a glorious image and likeness of God. ”

“ How they receive these beams, whether as a sterile desert or as a fertile garden, depends upon themselves. Yet the light and heat as they come from their divine source, are the same for all. But as the same sun blasts in some climes and beautifies in others, according to the characteristics or condition of the region which receives it, so the same law of love that gives existence and life to all, if it is received in order and in answering love, renders beautiful the soul of its recipient; but if received in disorder and hate, its very power of giving life is turned into a means of death. ”

“ In all mythology, in all the symbolic poetry of the older times, in all the traditions of the ages, when love, devotion, religion—any tender sentiment of heart or grace of spirit which was born of gentle affections—was symbolized, delineated, mythologically embodied, painted, or sculptured, it was always under the form of woman. We know that the world now is pretty well upside down, and that nothing remains just as it ought to be; but the true woman is still devotion, affection, love. ”

“ An all-wise Father has created an earth upon which He places the family of man. He has made these children of his, on a finite scale, an image and likeness of what He is infinitely. That is. He has made them beings of love, innocence and goodness, and capable of indefinite degrees of spiritual wisdom. It is his desire that they should pass from this world, prepared for angelic habitations, and live in the highest happiness forever. He, therefore, may be considered as speaking to mankind after this manner: You are human because you are free; and you are free moral agents because you are human. ”

“ When the love of self appropriated as its food the delusions of sense, the intellect soon yielded its concurrence. It is the experience of all time. When we are on the downward path, what we love we are very apt to persuade ourselves is right. Into the arms of whatever evil the heart throws itself, intellect and reason are called upon for their assent, and they soon yield. The fall of each and every man and woman begins and ends in a similar way. ”

“ The flames of hell are but the blazing fires of self-love, of passion and pride, enmity and envy, gluttony and debauchery, whatever burns in infernal breasts. Whatever is of self or self-derived intelligence, flames up as from a furnace of lust within the heart, whenever it is stirred into activity. ”

“ If, then, love is an implantation of the Lord's own spirit within the heart—true love, I mean—we see what a glorious tree of life it is as it takes root in the ground of the spirit, growls in vigor and expands in strength, until the whole life feeds upon its fruit and nourishes itself with its invigorating juices. ”

“ Thus the narrative of the Garden of Eden becomes so confused and incredible, that common sense is either forced to give way to a childlike faith in what is written, or to throw to the winds all confidence in Bible history. But can true science and true religion ever part company? Can common sense and revelation be really at variance? Would the God who made all science, have given a religion which denies its plainest propositions and ignores its most unquestioned truths? ”

“ He who attains this state of superabounding love, is in Eden; he who can see spiritual truth as clearly as he understands natural truth, is in the Lord's garden. Eden, as a sacred symbol, is love, with all the blessings that follow in its train; a garden, as a sacred symbol, is spiritual intelligence, with all the joys that follow its possession. And our early ancestors—no matter where they lived, nor by the side of what rivers, nor in what meridian, clime or zone—were in the Garden of Eden ”