and good for food; the Tree of Life also, in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.
Now the previous and more Scientific record of creation declares that he made “every plant of the field Implantation. before it was in the earth.” This opposite declaration, this statement that life issues from matter, contradicts the teaching of the first chapter, — namely, that all Life is God. Belief is beneath understanding. It involves theories of material hearing, sight, touch, taste, and smell, termed the five senses. The appetites and passions, sin, sickness, and death, follow in this train of error, of a belief in intelligent matter.
The first mention of evil is in the second chapter of Genesis, in the legend of the serpent. God pronounced Serpent and trees. good all that He created; and the Scriptures declare that He created all. The Tree of Life stands for the idea of Truth, and the sword which guarded it was the type of Divine Science. The Tree of Knowledge stands for the erroneous belief that the knowledge of evil is as real and God-bestowed as the knowledge of Good. Was evil instituted through God, Love, who created this fruit-bearer of sin, in contradiction of the first creation? This second account is a picture of error throughout.
Genesis ii. 15. And the Lord God [Jehovah] took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it.
The name Eden, according to Cruden, means pleasure, delight. In this text Eden stands for the mortal, material Garden. body. God could not put Mind into matter, or infinite Spirit into finite form, to dress it and keep it, — to make it beautiful, or cause it to live
