and the Tree of Life. This allegory is one repeated in many lands and ages, as in the classical fable of the Garden of the Hesperides and in the medieval Romance of the Rose; always the idea is repeated in a garden in whose centre grows some life-giving fruit or flower which is the reward of him who discovers the secret by which the centre of the garden may be reached. The meaning in all these stories is the same. The garden is the Garden of the Soul, and the Tree of Life is that innermost perception of Spirit of which the Master said that it would be a well of water springing up to everlasting life to all who realised it. It is the garden which elsewhere in Scripture is called "the garden of the Lord"; and in accordance with the nature of the garden, the plants which grow in it — and which man has to tend and cultivate — are thoughts and ideas; and the chief of them are his idea of Life and his idea of Knowledge, and these occupy the centre of the garden because all our ideas must take their colour from them.
We must recollect that human life is a drama whose action takes place in three worlds, and therefore, in reading the Bible, we must always make sure which world we are at any moment reading about — the spiritual, the intellectual, or the physical. In the spiritual world, which is that of the supreme ideal,
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