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170
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
may be judged from the serious notice which God is said to have taken of the act of disobedience. Not content with punishing the guilty, with a degree of severity which appears, at first sight, to be out of all proportion to the trivial nature of the fault committed by them, he actually condemned their whole progeny, for all eternity, to a life of suffering and sorrow on earth. Such a subject cannot be considered a nursery tale by any means, and deserves the utmost attention on our part. The failure to see that the whole secret of human wretchedness and sin lay concealed in this apparently meaningless and mythical account of the Fall of Adam has been the cause which has delayed the discovery of truth so long, and each day augmented the estrangement between man and happiness.
The circumstances surrounding the tragedy need not be gone into in detail. Briefly put, Adam, by the favour of the Almighty God, was residing in the Garden of Eden with his Consort Eve. Now, the Garden of Eden contained two extraordinary trees which are of special interest to us. One of these, which stood in the midst of the Garden, was called the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is the latter tree round which interest mainly centred in this little drama. The Lord God had commanded Adam, saying :
"Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
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For a long time, neither Adam nor Eve thought of eating of the forbidden tree, and the legend adds:"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
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