Eden

“ For the old pupils of Eden, the thought of its church is perhaps closest to memory and dearest to heart, among the many close and dear relics that accompany them through life. Its picture has value, and even a word concerning it is not worthless, for its aisles, its altar, its nooks, keep sacred hours of the past safe in those quiet shadows which breathe out incense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! ”

“ Eden merits its name. It is a mountain paradise, inhabited by people so kind and simple-hearted, that assuredly no vengeful angel will ever drive them out with his flaming sword. It hangs above the gorge, which is here nearly two thousand feet deep, and overlooks a grand wilderness of mountain-piles, crowded on and over each other, from the sea that gleams below, to the topmost heights that keep off the morning sun. The houses are all built of hewn stone, and grouped in clusters under the shade of large walnut-trees. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the flower of the spirit which blossoms on the tree of life. Every soul may plant and nurture it in its own garden, in its own Eden. It is Eden renewed—Paradise regained. Every one may have an Eden—a garden of Eden in his own soul. ”

“ Ah, never in all the world was a place like this Eden, this man's Eden of Heart's Desire!
A gentle wind sighed up the valley from the narrow cañon mouth, as it did every day. There was no variableness. Surprises did not come thither. The world ran always in one pleasant and unchanging groove. But the breeze this evening brought no smile of content to Dan Anderson's face as he sat waiting for the coming of the new and fateful visitor to our ancient Eden. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Any one who in that hard time had spoken a few kindly words to Eden—any one who would have taken him gently for a short while by the hand, and helped him over the stony places that hurt his unaccustomed feet—any one who would have suffered, or who would have invited him, to pour his sorrows into their ears and assist him to sustain them—might have won, even at that slight cost, the deepest and most passionate love of that trembling young heart. ”

“ Through Eden's fresh and flowering shades of yore?
Now are the fountains dried on that sweet spot,
And ye—our faded earth beholds you not!
Yet, by your shining eyes not all forsaken,
Man wandered from his Paradise away ”

“ 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. ”

“ I DREAMT last night of Eden—
⁠The Eden early made:
Where saints await their guerdon
⁠Till all on earth shall fade.
The lambkin and the lion
⁠Lay couched in happy sleep,
And all the songs of Zion
⁠Were echoing true and deep. ”

“ If we love this Word, let us not imagine that we may safely be indifferent to its higher purpose. If we reverence it, let us not be content with its lower or sensuous meaning. If we have caught one glimpse of its heavenly spirit, let us take it to our hearts and fill our souls with its delights, and in its every utterance try—as we are trying in this history of the planting and loss of Eden—to read therein of our own changes and chances, and to gain therein the help of the Lord and his angels, to arise like the prodigal and return to the soul's true home—the garden of the Lord. ”

“ Mercy closed Eden's gate. "Behold, saith the Lord, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden." ”

“ 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 ”

“ Not the ghost of any memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.
“This way lies insanity!” I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my feet, dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged my grey head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I tried again. It was no good. I felt beyond all question that I was indeed Eden, not Elvesham. But Eden in Elvesham’s body.
Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass current. ”

“ And God planted the Garden of Eden for the man to live in, with great shady trees, and a river singing as it flowed between its flowery banks. Then God brought to the man all the beasts and birds, and the man gave each a name, and they played together in the sunny fields. ”

“ No garden of Eden did poet ever describe so fair, for God "giveth to his beloved even in their sleep" more than most wakeful artists can reconstruct when "the meddling intellect misshapes the forms of things." What a Kingdom of Heaven she walks in; the poor tired maiden from the shop now become the new Eve in this Paradise of dreams! ”

“ Would all the plants and trees and flowers that grew and bloomed in the Garden of Eden in the days of Adam and Eve's innocence be still there, with the same leaves and blooms, just as they were, if man had not sinned? ”

“ The sword turns this way and that for ever.
'What of Adam cast out of Eden?
(And O the bower and the hour!)
Lo! with care like a shadow shaken,
He tills the hard earth whence he was taken.
'What of Eve too, cast out of Eden?
(Eden bower's in flower.)
Nay, but she, the bride of God's giving,
Must yet be mother of all men living.
'Lo, God's grace, by the grace of Lilith! ”

“ And now it was clear that the garden of Eden was all a fable, that man had never been perfect, that he had evolved slowly out of the beast. He had risen, not fallen, and stood now higher than ever before. ”

“ “Your God still walks in Eden, between the ancient trees,
Where Youth and Love go wading through pools of primroses.
And this is the sign we bring you, before the darkness fall,
5
That Spring is risen, is risen again,
That Life is risen, is risen again,
That Love is risen, is risen again, and Love is Lord of all. ”

“ The Hebrew idea of the golden age of Eden is pure and exalted. It consists in the enjoyment of the favor of God, and of all that is beautiful and excellent in his works. God and nature are the whole. Nor is it merely a rude, unintelligent, sensuous enjoyment. Man primeval is not a lazy savage gathering acorns. He is made in the image of the Creator; he is to keep and dress his garden, and it is furnished with every plant good for food and pleasant to the sight. ”

“ We, who, when we can, carry our hearts in our eyes, know very well, and have often said it before, that Eden is not so many days' journey away from our feet that we may not inhale its perfumes and press our brows against its sod whenever we wish. It is not cant, I hope, to say that Eden is not lost entirely. There stands no angel at its gates with flaming sword ”

“ We, too, incline to self and are tempted to our fall. Our Eden, however, is our infancy. Then the best of the Lord's angels are around and near us, and we are guileless, pure and innocent. It is a different condition from that of the most ancient Church; still it is our Eden. ”

“ So his Garden of Eden would now be an intelligence concerning spiritual things based upon what had been handed down from his forefathers, a tradition concerning the love state, but not an experience of it. For we must remember that we are tracing the spiritual fall of a race through its centuries of decadence. The present generation had much more of an intellectual assent than of an experimental knowledge of the wisdom of Eden. ”

“ The great notion of the centralness of man in the Garden of Eden re-asserts itself in every cabin of the western forests, or the southern jungles, where a solitary settler and his wife begin as it were the human history anew. There once again the note of Genesis is struck, and man asserts his centralness, and the beasts hesitate in fear till he shall tame them to his service, or bid them depart. The earth under his feet holds its fertility at his command, and what he does upon the earth is echoed in the storms. ”

“ For it is dragged in very laboriously into the very last place where it is wanted, before a splendidly large and luminous vision of the world newly created, and the first innocence of earth and sky. It is that passage in which the wanderer through space approaches Eden; one of the most unquestionable triumphs of all human literature. ”

“ Why, in struggling to do my duty, am I brought continually to the very gate of the only Eden I am ever to find in this world, and yet can never surprise the watching Angel of Wrath, and have to stand shivering outside, and see my Eden only by the flashing of the sword that bars my entrance? ”

“ 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. ”

“ That Garden of Eden must have been on a hill, with lowlands below, and high hills above, and roads both ways. The man seems to have gotten into the lowland road, and after a bit, struck some marshes and swamps, with a good bit of thick gray fog.
The first result of the break with God was in the man himself. Man has two doors opening into himself from God--the eye and the ear. Through these God comes into the man and makes Himself known. Through these comes all man knows of God. Both have their hinges in the will, the heart. Man gave both doors a slam shut that day in Eden. ”

“ For fifty-three years Eden has sent them forth to do the work of Christ, and after three and fifty years their names are laid by Christ's angels, as a garland of beauty on the brow of their Alma Mater. Numerous, but not countless,—for they are all counted,—are those who have passed to God,—religious and children ”

“ And this grand truth through every age and clime
Is written out in characters sublime;
But most we see the traces of His hand
In the great Epic of our native land.
This new world had its Adam and he fled—
God's was the voice and God's the mighty tread
Which scared the red man from his Eden bowers
God's the decree which made the garden ours!
And Eden 'twas and such it still remains:
Oh, Brothers! shall we prove a race of Cains?
Shall impious hands be armed with deadly things,
Because we bring up different offerings
Unto our altars? To the Nation's shrine
I take my gift ”

“ This world is a garden of God, set apart for the planting and growth of human souls. The garden of Eden, which God planted and beautified as the residence of the first parents of the human race, is a type of the ideal earth as it was conceived in the mind of God. ”

“ When Adam and Eve were driven from Eden, the flowers all shrank away from Eve with the exception of a little blue blossom, which Eve had named "heaven's flower," as its color was so much like the blue sky. ”

“ This land, Eden itself, behold, it is open unto thee, its sons welcome thee as brother.... Thou hast but to apply thy heart to wisdom and knowledge, become a public-spirited people, and speak their tongue! ”