Eden had sun and moon to make her bright; But Paradise hath God and Lamb for light, And hath no night.
Unspotted innocence was Eden's best; Great Paradise shows God's fulfilled behest, Triumph and rest.^
^ The Paradise of God can no more be determined locally than the original Garden of Eden. It is no more invisible than visible. It belongs to a region of another kind of experience than that of the senses. A paradise of God — we shall get the meaning of it by being of it. Let us repeat it to ourselves day and night for a week : " The tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.'' The meaning of it will begin to clear itself without effort. It is a state, a condition of experience which is closely connected with Jesus. It is not in a particular locality ; it is in Him, or, rather. He is in it. It is a place where His thought has become the atmosphere and His life the life.^
2. It is touching to see, in the later Jewish literature, how conscious men were of that shut door which Adam had closed against himself and his posterity ; and in their books a favourite image of the goodness of the end was that then the prohibition should be withdrawn, and men should come back to what they had lost. In the Book of Esdras we read, " For you is Paradise opened and the tree of life planted " ; and in Enoch, " No mortal is permitted to touch this tree of delicious fragrance till the Great Day of Judgment ; but then it will be given to the righteous and the humble." In this Book of Kevelation the image comes again and again : " Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have right to the tree of life." It had become a symbol of all that men had lost in their existence, which only God could restore.
1 Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 162. * R. F. Horton.
REVELATION ii. 7 65
It was a symbol of great depth of meaning ; for when men talked of the hope of Eden they confessed that what they lamented daily was not a fresh disaster or exclusion, but an old one, running back to Adam and the beginning.
If In the first glimpse of the Garden that is given us in the Book of Beginnings we are shown a picture of the ideal home of innocence, of the soul of the untried child of humanity. But there falls a shadow upon the picture as we note the entrance of sin, which results in the loss of innocence and the expulsion from the Garden and the unsheathing of the flaming sword to guard the sacred Tree of Life.
But there is given us another picture of the Garden in that other Book of Beginnings, the revelation that was given to John of the new heaven and the new earth. Beautiful is the Garden now as when it first sprang fresh from its Maker's hand. The gates are open to the four quarters of the wilderness. The flaming sword is in its sheath, and One like unto a Son of Man, clad in white robes and wearing a crown of victory, stands to welcome the returning exiles. As they come, they come by way of a Cross in the wilderness and along the banks of a glorious river, whose source they find to be in the Garden, where it waters the Tree of Life, of which they may now freely eat. One Garden is lost to us — we may not go back to Eden. But there is another Garden we may gain — it is ours to go forward, and the way of the Cross will lead us to its gates.^
3. Men who have little thought of the sin of Adam have yet a haunting sorrow because of what they have lost in life. There is a real pathos in the common legend of a golden age coming first which Greeks and Eomans cherished, when existence was sweet and fresh and right, and all men lived in peace. The Jews also thought of a blessed spring-tide of the world. Man's life began in a garden with flowers and streams, and God walked with him there, till by the one disobedience the charm was broken, and Adam must go out to a world with thistles instead of flowers, with labour and sickness and dying. They believed in God enough to believe that Eden was not lost, though no wandering horsemen ever came to encamp in it, or water their horses in its rivers, or caught sight of the flashing sword of God's angel who kept the way of entrance. They believed that there was a way
1 J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 138. REV.— 5
66 THE TREE OF LIFE
back, but they tried in vain to find it. To some the story of the earthly paradise, standing at the head of the Bible history of man, has seemed a mere fable or myth, with no more truth in it and of no more account than the dream of a golden age ; to some it has seemed an allegorical method of setting forth, as for children, the sinlessness and happiness of man's original estate and the misery of departure from God, true only in the sense in which the " Pilgrim's Progress " is true ; to some the outward and literal have been all in all, and under the influence of a strong fascina- tion they have even dreamed of discovering some lingering traces of the garden, or at least finding out where it lay. In vain: every trace of it has vanished as completely as the dew from last summer's grass. The paradise of promise and hope is the paradise of God ; no earthly garden, however fair, no restora- tion (through a cancelled forfeiture) of the paradise that has withered and died ; in the paradise of God grows the tree called " the tree of life."