will be plain to us that in this garden-of-Eden picture we have one of the most complete representations of our human life as it is lived before us in our own day. Wherever there has been an ideal home life, with those virtues and graces which have made Anglo-Saxondom what it has been; wherever there has been a home with a cheerful piety, living faith in God, high integrity in conduct, an atmosphere which was charged with all pure and tonic elements contributing to mental and spiritual health - there has been our modern garden of Eden.

In that garden God and man are represented in communion. Man has no slavish fear of God. He is not afraid of the divine because he is not conscious of being in rebellion against it. Not till the man and woman set up on their own account in selfwilled rebellion does fear come in fear of the divine and a desire to hide away from it. Is it not precisely so in our human life? Wherever there is a family which has fallen from that beautiful ideal, there is a lost Eden. Wherever there is a family in which there is no recognition of the divine, a family whose atmosphere is not charged with that reverence which always abides in man as God made him, there is reenacted the fall of man. Wherever there is an individual man or woman whose life is planned and ordered on the ignoring of the divine, there is evidence of the fall of man. Wherever a man leaves the higher for the lower, the nobler for the baser, spirit for flesh- there is the fall of man reenacted. There is no denying these facts and no getting clear of these inferences.

It is customary in our day to say: “Oh, yes, I believe in the fall of man, but it was a fall upward from a state of innocence to a state of knowledge and new experience. It was progress therefore." I am not going to deny that there is a sense in which those words are true. But if it be suggested that there was no other road to progress but that, I join issue. And I do it on the strength of the illumination there is in the facts of our common life.

reverences.

Here are two young men. I have them before my mind's eye. They are not inventions. They are living facts. One keeps the home feeling, the home He goes out to his life's work. He keeps his integrity. He maintains his self-respect. He is specially careful as to his associates. Of the tree of knowledge he has discrimination enough to pluck only the good fruit. He resolutely keeps, I repeat, his self-respect, his integrity, and his purity. He inserts himself into the company of the faithful because he knows that only by faith can a man live his best life. Is that man less of a man than this other to whom in a moment I will refer? Look at his form and look at his face. Listen to the character tones in his voice. These tell the story of a pure and intelligent manliness. This man is not fallen. He has held his integrity. He has been in unbroken communion with the divine.

The other began in Eden. He listened to the tempter, as Faust to Mephistopheles. All those plausible reasonings to which I have alluded, he dallied with, until in the place of faith there came doubt; and in the place of confidence, fear; and in

the place of quietude of spirit, unrest; and in the place of love, lust and aversion and hatred. He was outside his garden of Eden. On God and his guidance in conscience he had turned his back. Is he a better man than the other? He knows more of a sort, but he has lost more. He has lost his self-respect, his sense of integrity, his ability of saying an immediate and resolute, No! to Mephistopheles when he comes around. And, as a consequence, he has lost his faith in men - for it is almost impossible to lose one's faith in God and keep it in men. If anyone should say that this last man has anything good in wisdom or knowledge or feeling or will which the first has not I challenge proof. I will tell you what he has not that the other has. He has not so clean a soul. He has not so restful an eye. He has not so honest a voice. He has not so resolute a will. He has not so agreeable a feeling of self-respect. The one man has nothing to cover up. The other has several cupboards in which there are skeletons and he is afraid lest some one should find the key and open the doors.

This garden-of-Eden story is almost photographically correct of the way in which every man who falls, falls. It is a picture for all time and for every place. If men would only read the Bible in the light of the facts of human life with which we are familiar, the question of its inspiration would be asked no more. How do I know this book is inspired? How? It knows me better than I know myself. It knows human nature more accurately and minutely and profoundly, at a deeper

depth, than any poet or any philosopher or any psychologist I ever met with. That is my answer for myself. Of that I have not even the remnant of a doubt.

And so, let us each to himself apply our theme by asking: Am I fallen? Have I lost my Eden? Have I lapsed from a former former spirituality of mind? Am I less desirous of using the means of communion with the divine than once I was? Is my faith in Christ's service a little more shaky than once? Is my zeal a little cooler? Have I lost my first love? Has my will to good been fortified by a persistent submission to the divine will? Do I know what it is to rest in the Lord and wait patiently for his working out his great designs? What church am I a member of - is it the church of Laodicea? When I compare my present self with a former self, have I fallen? Do I in my own personal history illustrate this old patriarchal allegory? The Bible was never intended to be interpreted by unspiritualized mind. It has an inner sense which appeals to the spirit in man. And many a man says: "I don't believe in your garden-of-Eden story," when he himself in his own person is a living proof of its truth. Our great Teacher has told us positively that he sometimes spoke in parables for the very purpose of hiding the truth from men, whose rejection of it would only have added to their guilt. And so, for aught we know, our Bible may have been constructed on the principle of disclosing its inner spiritual meaning to all spiritualized minds, while to others it is only a perplexing and

mysterious history of an obstinate and self-willed people.

Be that as it may, in the light of these suggestions, does there not come into that beautiful passage I oftentimes use at the close of our evening service, a new feeling and idea? "Unto him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen."