Garden Of Eden or the Paradise Lost and Found

I take up this book and call your attention to it. You perhaps will say, "Oh, that is the old Bible, worn threadbare long ago. We do not wish to be fed with its dry husks. We want living food and drink." Well, that is what I am going to give you.

Yes! it is an old book, a very old book. There are very few books extant that can compare with it, on the score of age, at least. Some parts of it were written over three thousand years ago; and all of it more than eighteen hundred years ago. Yes! an old book. And yet everybody seems to have one about the house. What is the matter with the old book? Why do people cling to it with such tenacity? Can any of those who have, laid it, on the shelf as worthless answer these questions? Why do they not burn it, so that it shall no longer cumber the house?

This was a mystery to me for many years; but it is so no longer. I know the reason for its hold upon the people. It contains that, though clad in mystery, which acts upon the soul like a potent spell; like a magnet, which it is indeed. Had it no value, or had its value been wholly extracted; were there no truth in it unrevealed, it had long since ceased to exert any influence whatever over anybody. Books that are exhausted of their truth by its being transferred to the minds of the people, lose their force and die. And this is the reason that, Task you to search its hidden mystery with me; to cast aside preconceived ideas of its meaning; to commence to read it as if it were for the first time.

Religion and science admit there was an original cause which set up in matter the motion that ultimated in man. The latter examines into the various works that preceded his appearance, and discovers that he came is a result of them all; indeed, that, except, they had first, existed, he could never have lived; that the omission of a single progressive step in the creative plan would have defeated the work. But science goes further than this. It not only asserts that man was the last link in a long chain of development, but it also maintains that, when the creation once began, there was no power residing anywhere that could have interposed its edicts to stay the progress, or defeat the final production of man; that he was a necessary product of creation, as fruit is of the tree, and that all the designs and purposes of the moving power were contained in and exhausted by his creation; that is, that as a fruit of the creative plan, man was the highest possibility of the universe.