BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 41

It’s enough for you that I command.” He might have said
that, and, if He had, obedience would have been both wise
and dutiful. But He begged them for their own sakes not to
touch it. He told them it was not good for them, and that
therefore He wished them not to touch it. God did not com-
mand for the mere sake of commanding, but for the good of
His earth’s children that he loved so well.

But Adam and Eve—like most of their countless progeny—
preferred their own way. They were willful and wayward, and
willfulness and waywardness had their reward. They sold
themselves for naught; they bartered Paradise for an empty
fancy, and, when the voice of God was heard in the garden,
shame and fear came upon them, and they tried to hide them-
selves from God!

“And the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of
Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. So He
drove out the man, and Ile placed at the east of the Garden
of Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every
way to keep the way of the tree of life.” wh

How sad was that exile from the glories of Paradise.
Shame and humiliation, and a future dark, with gathering
clouds, was the reward of transgression.

And yet, in the midst of all this gloom and darkness,
there are lines of light and stars of hope. Our first parents
are driven out into the desert, not to die, forsaken of God,
and cut off from all mercy. The mercy of God was not
bounded by the Garden of Eden, God is God of the desert
as well as of the garden. Adam and Eve were exiles from
the garden, but not from the grace of God. They were to
go forth—still under his eye, still under his care
in the sufferings and sorrows of the wilderness, what they
would not learn amid the glories of the Garden. Wanderers

 

and learn,