The following passages in the book of Genesis have reference to the subject in hand. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the Garden, and the tree., of knowledge of good and evil" (ii. 9). " And the Lord God commanded the man saying, 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die" (ii. 16 and 17). "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed " (ii. 25). "And the serpent said unto the woman " Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked." (iii. 4 to 7). "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception" "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." (iii. 16 and 17). "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 for ever. Therefore the Lord God sent him from the Garden of Eden (iii. 22 and 23).

And now we ask what are we to understand by this story? Are we to take it literally, as many would suggest, or are we to leave it as a mystery too deep for words to explain? And yet this is the mystery of mysteries, the original mystery by which we came to be born and to die. If we can here get a clue to our birth and death, can we not thereby unravel secrets by which we can surely prevent our death and rebirth, and gain everlasting life. And surely there must be an explanation for the words, Tree of life, and Tree of knowledge of good and evil, cannot be mistaken in their real import, and these cannot be identified with any earthly tree actually in existence. The Tree here is clearly a metaphor signifying the soul's True Being in freedom (moksha) and its false life in Bhanda, the light and shadow of our human existence. As bound up in the world the sum of our existence consists in our knowledge of likes and dislikes, of what conduces to our pleasure and what gives us pain, and our memory of both, and as Doctor Bain would define it, the sense of similarity and of difference and retentiveness.

That is to say, our human knowledge is built up from our very birth, of a series of acts and experiences which give us pleasure or pain, or make us indifferent, and our sense of them, and Desire and Will are also slowly built up. The greater the pleasure we fancy a certain act or experience gives us, the more do we desire its repetition or continuance; the greater the pain we apprehend from an act, the more do we hate its repetition or continuance. But it happens also the greater the pleasure or the pain, the more prolonged its continuance, oftener it is repeated, the pleasure itself palls and we grow callous to the pain. Life may therefore be divided into a series of acts, or a sequence of them, one flowing from another, and close on each, each yielding a certain result or experience or fruit, be it pleasure or pain, good or evil. And God's injunction was that we should not eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil or experience the pleasure or pain which will flow from our acts of good and evil, in this tree of wordly life.

And one can ask, why it is we should not seek the bent of our inclination, why we should not secure the good in life, and the pleasure and happiness thereof, and avoid the evil, and the pain and suffering thereof, and the best knowledge that will secure to us to attain these ends? And God's injunction appears stranger, when it is seen that there is not only an injunction not to try to know the evil, but that there is also an injunction that we should not know the good. And to know the good, if not to know the evil, must at least appear to us to be our duty. And all our moral text books and lessons and sermons are intended to teach us this duty. And the fruits or acts resulting from our knowledge of both good and bad are both forbidden to man, and the punishment for disobeying this Law or Word of God is said to be death itself with the further penalty of being shut out of partaking of the ever lasting Tree of Life.

And of course there may be no wrong in our knowing what is good for us and what is bad and in our desiring to seek the one and avoiding the other, provided we can know what is realty good and what is bad, provided we can get what we desire and provided also that we can know what it is that we mean by the 'us' or 'I'. Do all persons understand what will really bring them good and what will bring them evil? Is every act which gives pleasure at once a good, and every act which gives pain a wrong? When the child cries for sweets, and struggles hard against swallowing a bitter potion, is it really seeking its good and avoiding evil? When the school-boy chafes under school-discipline and desires to sow his own wild oats, is he really avoiding pain and seeking pleasure? Does the man of the world when he seeks power and pelf and resorts to all sorts of ways to gain that end really seek his own good, or when he chafes in a prison as a result of his previous actions, does he think that it is for his good? And then again, when we seek pleasure and beyond our means, does not that really bring us suffering? More than all, how many of us do rightly understand the 'I' and to which we want to minister? To the great majority, the 'I' means nothing more than the bare body, and the external senses, and is not the whole world engaged most strenuously in satisfying their bodily wants and appetites? How many are there who understand that they have a moral nature, how many, that they have a spiritual nature? Even when we do know that we have a moral nature and a spiritual nature, how many do try to act up to the requirements of their moral and spiritual nature, being more or less dragged and constrained by their worldly desire! In our ideas of good and bad, don't we confound our several natures, don't we confound what is good for the soul with what is good for the body? To most of us, the world and our belly are our God and nothing more.