Sunday School Lesson:In the Begining (Part 2)
Among other tales, the mothers tried to tell the children the story of how God made the world. They said it was made in six wonderful days – what we call the Creation. Every day, they explained, for six days running, God made something beautiful and new. First of all was Light. And then He made the blue skies and seas, the mountains and the meadows, the waving trees, the sun, the moon and stars, the fishes and the singing birds and all the animals, great and small. And on the seventh day He rested, and saw that all the things which He had made were good.
The mothers could not explain these six wonderful Days of God, nor say how long or how short they had been. But they told how, on the sixth day, God made man in His own image, and afterwards gave him a beautiful garden to live in, and a fair sweet women to be his wife.
A river flowed through the blossoming garden, and long afterwards it became four rivers, which watered the sandy country which the big cites were built much later. But the first crystal springs of the river were in Eden, where God had planted the Garden of Wonderful Trees. How wistfully the Tent people must have talked of it! Trees of every kind grew there. At noon the sunshine filtered through boughs laden, they like to think, with apricots and oranges, figs and mulberries, red-gold pomegranates and purple grapes. The loving kindness of God breathed through the blossoms, and His mercy dropped n the gentle silver dew. And the man and the woman, who were called Adam and Eve, could eat all the fruit in the garden except the fruit of a tree which grew in the midst of the others and was called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the midst of the Garden there was also another wonderful tree, the Tree of Life.
Nobody knows what these two trees were like; but they must have been very beautiful, with cool and tempting fruit. We know that the Tree of Knowledge was pleasant to look at; while the Tree of Life seems to have been in a quiet holy place all alone, as if in its boughs lingered the secrets of God. It has never been described to us, and we can only picture it as a Tree of fragrance and mystery; with songs in it that were not sung by birds, and gentle rustlings that were not made by breezes.