Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/116

 

VII.

THE EXPULSION.

And the Lord God said. Behold, 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 forever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from, the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man.—Gen. iii. 22, 23.

HE expulsion from Eden, viewed in its mere surface sense, appears to have been a very arbitrary proceeding on the part of the Lord. Its cause seems to have been wholly inadequate, its consequences not legitimately growing out of the act, and the punishment out of all proportion to the crime.

Let us take a supposed case. A father places his child in a garden where there are two kinds of fruit, each of them tempting to the eye and giving outward evidence of being luscious to the taste. The child is informed—without a why or a wherefore, but on the impulse of a mere whim and as a test of his implicit obedience—that he may eat of the one kind of fruit and not of the other. The declared conditions or consequences are: if he obeys he shall live, if not he shall die. It is a severe test, and the punishment altogether dispro-