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SIDE-LIGHTS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS.

I.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE TREE OF LIFE.

EA

GENESIS ii. 9, 17.

ASTWARD in Eden lay the garden; and out of the garden ground there grew every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Of every tree of the garden but that might its privileged pair of tenants freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil might they not eat; for to eat thereof was all too surely to die.

"All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;
And all amid them stood the tree of life,

High, eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold; and next to life,

Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by,
Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill."

So near grows death to life. For, as Milton has it in the Areopagitica, good and evil in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that "those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving

together, leaped forth into the world." And perhaps, surmises in his prose the poet of Paradise Lost, this is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.* Jeremy Taylor makes it observable that in the mentions of Paradise in the Apocalypse, twice is the tree of life spoken of, but never once the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because this was the symbol of secular knowledge, of prudence and skill of doing things of this world, which we can naturally use: we may smell and taste them, but not feed upon them. Of that forbidden tree, however, the smell alone of the fruit must, by its fascination, have been perilous, and the taste of it was death.

"Whereof whoso did eat, eftsoones did know

Both good and ill: O mournfull memory!

That tree through one man's fault hath doon us all to dy !”

In the thirty-second canto of his vision of purgatory, Dante hears a throng with one voice murmuring " Adam," and sees them circling a tree despoiled of leafage, and takes note of a benediction on

"Gryphon,† whose beak hath never pluck'd that tree
Pleasant to taste; for hence the appetite

Was warp'd to evil."

And in the next canto the subject is renewed, and mystically expounded in warning words and tones. Dr. Spiegel, in his elaborate comparison of Genesis with the Zend-avesta, is of course mindful of the two trees in the midst of the garden,— the acquaintance of the Iranians with two trees (one of them

* Treating the Biblical narrative of the fall as an allegorical representation of the development of the consciousness of our first parents, Blasche affirms their life in Paradise, their state of innocence, to have been, like the state of earliest infancy in general, an unconscious life of instinct; for all mental development begins with the consciousness of man: the higher spiritual creation, the culture of the mind, commences with consciousness.

†The coincidence may be worth noting of the alleged identity of griffin with the cherub that had charge of the Tree of Life,-Delitzch, for instance, deriving the name from charab, "grab, grapple, grasp, gripe," Sanscr. gribh, Pers. giriften, Goth. griffan: comp. Greek Ypúy, as a being that holds fast, and makes what it holds unapproachable. Dr. Thomas Burnet

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