sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.  Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to, thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken:  for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Sentence being thus spoken, Jehovah prepares the man and woman for their future life by making coats of skins to dress them with.  Then turning to His celestial company, “Behold,” He says, “the man is become like one of us to know good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”  With these words he drives man out of Paradise, and places before it the cherubs, and the flaming sword, which turns every way, to keep the way of the tree of Life (Genesis i. 4b-iii. 24).

The gloomiest view of life as it now is, lies at the root of this story.  Man’s days are mere hardship and labour and task-work, a task-work with no prospect of relief, for the only reward of it is that he returns to the earth from which he was taken.  No thought appears of any life AFTER death, and life WITHOUT death might have been, but has been forfeited, now the cherub guards the approach to the tree of life, of which man might have eaten when in Paradise but did not.  This actual, cheerless lot of man upon the earth is the real problem of the story.  It is felt to be the very opposite of our true destiny; at first, things must have been otherwise.  Man’s lot now is a perversion of what it was at first, it is the punishment of primeval guilt now resting on us all.  At first man lived in Paradise; he had a happy existence, and one worthy of his nature, and held familiar intercourse with Jehovah; it was his forbidden striving after the knowledge of good and evil that drove him out of Paradise and brought all his miseries upon him.

What is the knowledge of good and evil?  The commentators say it is the faculty of moral distinction,—­conscience, in fact.  They assume accordingly that man was in Paradise morally indifferent, in a state which allowed of no self-conscious action and could not be called either good or evil.  A state like this not being an ideal one, some of them consider that man gained more than he lost by the fall, while others admit that it could not be the divine intention to keep him always at this stage of childish irresponsibility, and that this cannot be the view of the narrator either.

But it is plain that the narrator is not speaking of a relative prohibition of knowledge, but an absolute one:  he means that it is only for God, and that when man stretches out his hand towards it he is transcending his limits and seeking to be as God.  On the other side he cannot of course mean to say that conscience is a doubtful blessing, and its possession to be deplored, or that it is a thing that God in fact refuses to men and reserves to Himself alone.  The knowledge spoken of cannot be moral knowledge.  What could the assertion mean that God would have no one but Himself know the difference between good and evil, and would deny to man this knowledge?  One would think that conscience is a thing belonging specifically to man and not to God.