Sin could not be allowed to stay there.  Its presence stole heaven away from heaven.  Yet sin had become a part of the man.  The man and the wrong were interwoven.  They were inseparable.  Sin has such a tenacious, gluey, sticky touch!  Each included the other. It could not be put out without his being put out.  So man had to be driven out for his own sake to rid his home-spot of sin.  The man was driven out that he might come back—­changed.  Love drove him out that later it might let him in.  The tree of life was kept from him for a time that it might be kept for him for an eternity.

When he had changed his spirit, and changed sides in the fight with evil started that day, and gotten victory over the spirit now dominant within himself, those gates would swing again.  When the stain of his choice would be taken out of his fibre it would be his right eagerly to retrace these forced steps, and the coming back would find more than had been left.  Love has been busy planning the home-coming.  The tree of life has been grown in his absence to a grove of trees.  The life has become life more abundant.

Outside the Eden Gate.

The story of what took place outside that guarded gate makes clear the love, the wise farsighted love that showed the man the way out that day.  To tell the story one must use a pen made of the iron that has entered his own soul, and though the pen be eased with ball point, it scratches and sticks in the paper for sheer reluctance.  And only the tears of the heart will do for ink.

That was a costly meal.  That first bite must have been a big one.  Its taste is still in the mouth of the race.  If that fruit were an apple it must have been a crab.  There has been a bad case of indigestion ever since.  If you think there were no crab-apples in Eden, then the touch of those thickening lips must have soured it in the eating—­man’s teeth are still on edge.  The fruit became tough in the chewing.  It’s not digested yet.  That Garden of Eden must have been on a hill, with lowlands below, and high hills above, and roads both ways.  The man seems to have gotten into the lowland road, and after a bit, struck some marshes and swamps, with a good bit of thick gray fog.

The first result of the break with God was in the man himself.  Man has two doors opening into himself from God—­the eye and the ear.  Through these God comes into the man and makes Himself known.  Through these comes all man knows of God.  Both have their hinges in the will, the heart.  Man gave both doors a slam shut that day in Eden.  Yet they went shut gradually.  That was the God-side of their shutting.  He quickly slipped in an air cushion so the shutting might be softened and delayed, and meanwhile His presence be appealing to the man.