In the lengthening days of Eden’s one Summer these two were more and more completely enfolded in the Illusion of Light.  It was under this spell that, dwelling upon the enticement of fruit good to look at, and pleasant to the taste, the Serpent denied Death, and thought of Good as separate from Evil.  “Ye shall not surely die, but shall be as the gods, knowing good and evil.”  So far, in his aspiring day-dream, had the Serpent fared from his old familiar haunts—­so far from his old-world wisdom!

A surer omen would have come to Eve had she listened to the plaintive notes of the bewildered Dove that in his downward flutterings had begun to divine what the Serpent had come to forget, and to confess what he had come to deny.

For already was beginning to be felt “the season’s difference,” and the grave mystery, without which Paradise itself could not have been, was about to be unveiled,—­the background of the picture becoming its foreground.  The fond hands plucking the rose had found the thorn.  Evil was known as something by itself, apart from Good, and Eden was left behind, as one steps out of infancy.

From that hour have the eyes of the children of men been turned from the accursed earth, looking into the blue above, straining their vision for a glimpse of white-robed angels.

Yet it was the Serpent that was lifted up in the wilderness; and when He who “became sin for us” was being bruised in the heel by the old enemy, the Dove descended upon Him at His baptism.  He united the wisdom of the Serpent with the harmlessness of the Dove.  Thus in Him were bound together and reconciled the elements which in human thought had been put asunder.  In Him, Evil is overcome of Good, as, in Him, Death is swallowed up of Life; and with His eyes we see that the robes of angels are white, because they have been washed in blood.

From ‘A Study of Death,’ copyright 1895, by Harper and Brothers

DEATH AND SLEEP

The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.  While the organism is alive as a human embodiment, death is present, having the same human distinction as the life, from which it is inseparable, being, indeed, the better half of living,—­its winged half, its rest and inspiration, its secret spring of elasticity, and quickness.  Life came upon the wings of Death, and so departs.

If we think of life apart from death our thought is partial, as if we would give flight to the arrow without bending the bow.  No living movement either begins or is completed save through death.  If the shuttle return not there is no web; and the texture of life is woven through this tropic movement.