^ That which we have is never the tree of life to us. The tree of life is always the thing which we must reach forward to attain ; and if our condition of life is that we are satisfied to take these fruits which grow upon the tree of life, what is according to the ordinary conventional acceptation the best thing, the correct thing, the most important thing, let us not be satisfied with that. Let us look over once more where the protecting rampart of fire and of sword stands between us and some more desirable object.^
Old man, old man, God never closed a door Unless one opened. I am desolate, For a most sad resolve wakes in my heart ; But always I have faith. Old men and women Be silent; He does not forsake the world. But stands before it modelling in the clay And moulding there His image. Age by age The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard For its old heavy, dull, and shapeless ease.'^
3. " He drove out the man " means that the pleasantness, and ease, and safety, of the Garden were taken from him : that he had forfeited, and was made to feel he had forfeited, the delightful sense of a constant nearness to God, and of imrestrained inter- coiirse with Him ; that he had to go out into the comparative desolation of the common unblessed world to fight for his own hand, and to make the best he could of things. Well, of course everybody knows that this was, in a very true sense, the best thing that could have happened to him, since he fell. Mankind has risen slowly to its present state of power and progress just because it had to fight its way up against a multitude of difficulties and obstacles, which gradually called out and educated its powers and faculties of body and of mind. The struggle with wild beasts ; the struggle with harsh climates and unkindly soils ; the struggle with what seemed the inveterate hostility, or the incurable caprice, of nature: these and such-like things have made man what he is in position and resource. Go the world » W. Boyd Carpenter. ' W. B. Yeata.
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over, and you will find that exactly those races which might seem to have been most effectually " driven out," and left furthest ofif from the earthly paradise, have been the races which have attained the highest civilization.
^ It is remarkable that in so many great wars it is the defeated who have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians; they ended in the decline of the Saracens, That huge prophetic wave of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom : that wave was broken, and never came on again. The Crusades had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat ; the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its last battle, but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.^
4. What was the occasion of the expulsion ? The blessing of the Divine Presence was conditional upon obedience to the Divine wUl. Paradise was forfeited by the preference of selfish appetites over the command of God. The expulsion from Paradise was the inevitable consequence of sin ; the desire of man for the lower life was granted. He who asserted his own against the Divine will had no place in the Paradise of God.
Take the meanest and most sordid face that passes you, the face most brutalized by vice, most pinched and strained by business; — that man has his tree of life, his own separate possibility of being, luxuriant and vital, fresh, free, original. " How terribly he has missed it," you say. Indeed he has. A poor, misguided thing he is, as wretched as poor Adam when he had been driven from his tree of life, and stood naked and shivering outside the Garden, with the beasts that used to be his subjects snarling at him, and the ground beginning to mock him with its thorns and thistles. That poor man evidently has been cast out of his garden, and has lost his tree of life. And is it not evident enough how he lost it ? Must it not have been that he
* O, K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trijlet.
ii8 THE TREE OF LIFE
was wilful ? Must it not have been that, at the very beginning, he had no idea but for himself, no notion of living in obedience to God?
^ What makes the scholar's life a failure ? What makes him sigh when at last the books grow dim before his eyes, and the treacherous memory begins to break and lose the treasures it has held ? He has been studying for himself, wilfully, not humbly, taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge. What makes the workman turn into a machine ? What makes us feel so often, the more his special skill develops, that he is growing less and not more a man ? What shuts the merchant up to his drudgery, making it absolutely ridiculous and blasphemous to say of him, as we watch the way he lives and the things he does from the time he rises till the time he goes to bed, " That is what God made that man for " ? What makes every one of us sigh when we think what we might have been ? Why is every one of us missing his highest ? Why are we all shut out from our trees of life ? There is one word, one universal word, that tells the sad story for us all. It is selfishness — selfishness from the beginning. If we had not been selfish, if we had lived for God from the beginning, if we had been consecrated, we know it would have been different ; we should have had our Eden inside and not outside ; we should have eaten in God's due time of our tree of life ; and have come to what He made us for, — our fullest and our best life.^