CHAPTER III

THE EARLY MORNING OF HISTORY

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. - MATT. 13:33.

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ITH the expulsion of "the man" from Eden, the curtain falls upon the first act of this allegorical story. The use of this term without naming Adam and Eve, who, it has been supposed, were the only inhabitants of the garden, is consistent with the metaphorical nature of the whole narrative, and evidently signifies type or kind instead of particular individuals. It is expressly stated that the man was cast out because of his knowledge of evil, which shows unmistakably that such knowledge is impossible to God, and necessarily excludes its possessor from the deific presence. This kind. of man was clearly not the ideal of the son of God, and could not, therefore, be acknowledged by the Father. The sequel of the story would imply that the man whom it featured was a sham and an impostor.

The woman's recognition that evil, masked in the story as a serpent, was a beguiler or enchanter, was naturally followed by the self-exposure of sin's inanity and the realization that no ungodly mode of thought or its embodiment had any possible place in paradise. It was plainly the uncovering of the evil nature of this kind of man which banished it from the garden, and doomed it to self-punishment and death, evidently implying that good and evil, Spirit and flesh, are the true and the false, which have nothing in common and cannot dwell together.

The next great act staged in the drama of mortal man, an act which followed the events of the garden in logical sequence, is presented in the story of the Deluge.

To what extent its description is historically accurate may not be determined, but its general correctness would seem to be corroborated by the traditions of other races. To the conscience of the early Hebrews it was accepted unquestioningly as the divine punishment for human wickedness, but the utter futility of attempting to purify the earth by drowning its inhabitants was so impressed upon Noah, that the assurance that this experience would not be repeated was later recorded as a covenant from God. The clearer vision of the prophets saw that the evil in human thought would have to be burned out with the fire of Truth.

In this story, the Creator is represented as thoroughly disappointed and displeased with His own work. The man of the earth had turned out so badly as to be unfit to live, and so we read that the great flood came and destroyed "all in whose nostrils was the breath of life," with the exception of the family of Noah. The whole story, in its metaphysical aspect, bespeaks God's utter repudiation of materialism, for it undoubtedly teaches that the man formed "of the dust of the ground" is not the man in whom He delights. Beyond all question, the material concept of being had utterly failed to show forth the glory of God, and this failure revealed its absolute unlikeness to Deity. Speaking to this type of man, which was cast out of Eden, Jesus said, "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do," a pronouncement which should prove conclusively that God was not its author.

The outstanding feature of the story of the Flood is not that the world was deluged because of its wickedness, but that one man was found good enough to preserve himself and his family from the general destruction. The incident of the ark is the first recorded instance of the protective power of a knowledge of God in the presence of physical danger. We learn from the narrative that Noah's preservation was due to his righteousness, or right-mindedness, and not that God singled him out for the purpose of prolonging the human race. This

fact is far-reaching in its significance and application, and its evidence will be seen to increase as we trace the journey of the human consciousness towards its perception of the Christ. It should be well understood that the salvation of Noah and his family was not the work of chance, or a piece of mere good fortune, but was due to the operation of a law which transcends material conditions, and which was brought to bear upon the present need through Noah's nearness to God in his own consciousness. Had there been others of the same class, they would undoubtedly have been included in the same salvation.

We have heard from childhood the story of Enoch's exemption from death, and of Noah's deliverance from the Flood, but we have been wrongly taught to read into the sacred records the inference that these were special favors from God, which should not be expected under similar circumstances by other human beings. This inference is the thinly veiled philosophy of the carnal mind, which ever seeks to deprive man of his divine rights. It was plainly Enoch's close acquaintance with the divine life of man, which lifted him above the reach of mortality, and not that God had more respect for him than for others who might reach the same degree of spiritual consciousness.

The Bible came into being that the way to overcome the wicked one" might be revealed to men. If the possibility of escape from moral and physical evils, through an apprehension of divine power, did not exist, the Scriptures would, in consequence, have no practical value for oppressed humanity. Confined by its own theories to matter, human sense would be without any appreciable evidence of the existence of Spirit, or of the applicability of spiritual law to human need, except as material evils were overcome by supermaterial means. When it is remembered that the serpent is but a figure in metaphor to represent the deceptive nature of evil knowledge, it can be seen that as men begin to emerge from the delusions of that false knowledge, and to know that God is the only power or law in the universe, they would

naturally begin to have dominion over the traditional fears engendered by a physical sense of being. From this standpoint one may readily understand the incidents recorded in the Scriptures which have seemed miraculous to the human mind.

The recurrence of these signs or proofs of divine power over so-called earthly forces, which we find throughout the history of Israel, would indicate that they are an inseparable characteristic of a genuine knowledge of God. As human consciousness becomes spiritually illumined, the darkness of materialism must, to that extent, lose its apparent substance and power, and cease to obscure a realization of God's omnipotence. The human sense, groping among the shadows of materiality, has been struggling towards what St. Paul called "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God," and it is this human struggle to find the truth about God which is recorded throughout the sacred writings of the Hebrews.

The conflict between the flesh and Spirit, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, foreshadowed in the Edenic prophecy, is what human history in reality consists of, for all true civilization implies some degree of evil grappled with and overcome. A nation or a people which possessed no moral fiber, whose ideals were not founded upon righteousness, or which felt no quickening desire to be a blessing in the earth, would have no history worth recording, or any memories fit to survive. We may confidently look forward to the time when whatever had its rise in evil will be expunged from human records, and good will be recognized as the only rightful sphere of man's consciousness and activity.

Conflict, however, naturally involves more than one, hence the belief in a plurality of minds provides the only possible basis for strife and division. Without a belief in the opposite of divinity, there could be no conflict of interests, and no evil to strive with; but the acceptance of both good and evil as power and intelligence has ever involved humanity in perpetual discord. A

mutual hostility necessarily exists between the right and the wrong of things, whether in individual mentalities or in the ideals of nations, and peace cannot be experienced between these opposite states. This enmity must continue until human consciousness shall be so illumined with the consciousness of the infinitude of good that evil will disappear as the moral darkness that it is.

After the Flood we find the human race branching out into three streams, flowing from the sons of Noah, and representing types or gradations of human thought. In Noah's prophetic declaration regarding his sons, the chief blessing and the chief place are bestowed upon Shem. The benediction, "Blessed be the Lord God of Shem," was not repeated of the other two sons, neither was the promise that God would dwell in their tents. This passage evidently implies that Shem possessed the highest concept of Deity, and that, in all probability, his descendants would maintain the same distinction. It is not to be assumed, however, that Shem was chosen before his brothers to be the progenitor of Israel for any other reason than that he possessed above them the quality of thought through which God could best become known to men.

It will be observed that the ancestry of Israel did not include all the sons of Shem, for but one of them was named to carry on the elect line, and this process of selection went on from generation to generation, taking but one from each family, until we come to the twelve sons of Jacob. The "tents of Shem," therefore, cannot be interpreted as meaning all of his family descendants, but evidently referred to that chosen or selected race which afterwards came to be known as the people of God. This selective process was not always confined to the first-born son, so that a higher influence than family considerations was plainly at work in forming what the apostle called, "a chosen generation."

We gather from the records that the interval after the passing of Noah presented little evidence of any general improvement. As it was with mankind before