with somewhat of spiritual life, or endowed with heavenly affection; that is to say, the Lord was not willing, if man was determined to enter upon a state in which self should be the conscious element of his existence, to leave his selfhood dry and hard and lifeless. If man was determined to depart from the primal order of his life, He would give him in that departure as much of spiritual life as possible. And He builded his self-consciousness, selfhood, or proprium, into a form of living affection. The dead proprium symbolized by the rib, was builded into a spiritualized affection adjoined to this self-conscious life, symbolized by the woman.
Thus was it, in this divine parable of Eden, that the Lord took the rib—it is not said that He took it out of or away from Adam—and closed up the flesh in the place thereof, and built it into a woman whom He brought to the man. Since that day man has been more or less under the dominion of the proprium. He has thought and loved to think of life and its surroundings as his own. If at any time he has risen above this state and prostrated himself before the throne of God, he may oft and again have been ready to acknowledge the Lord's position as the center and fountain of all, but he still has walked, in some sense, with himself forever before his eyes. Not that the consciousness of personal identity was then or ever,
