Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/121

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The Expulsion.
115

style of all divine writings. It is so given with a purpose. Some of the common expressions of our day are similarly fashioned and for the same purpose. The old sayings "The sun rises," and "The sun goes down," are familiar illustrations. These phrases have come down to us from a people whose system of astronomy was all false, and who believed that the sun literally moved around the earth in twenty-four hours; that at the end of each day it sunk below the horizon: and that at the end of each night it rose again on the eastern side. That is the appearance, but it is not the reality. We all now know that the earth revolves upon its own axis in the twenty-four hours, and turns us in its movement toward and away from the sun. Yet this language of appearance, in this and many other instances that might be mentioned, remains unchallenged. Children and ignorant people are permitted to use it with a mistaken idea attaching to it, because they could not understand the truth if explained to them. But the educated are in no wise deceived or misled thereby, using themselves the same expressions, with a full conception of the true doctrine which lies within or behind this language of appearance; and the same children who, as children, accepted the apparent for the genuine truth, slowly and unconsciously, through education, come at last to connect only the real truth