Side-Lights on Scripture Texts

Excerpt from Side-Lights on Scripture Texts

Eastward in Eden lay the garden; and out of the garden ground there grew 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. Of every tree of the garden but that might its privileged pair of tenants freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil might they not eat; for to eat thereof was all too surely to die.

"All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;
And all amid them stood the tree of life,
High, eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold; and next to life,
Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by.
Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill."

So near grows death to life. For, as Milton has it in the Areopagitica, good and evil in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.

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