In 1864, page 529, W. K. Pendleton writes:

      Life and death, it may be truly said, are emphatically Bible themes. As nothing short of Revelation can give us correct and reliable information concerning them, so we do well to take care that our views and beliefs as to them are derived from the Scriptures. Nothing is more important to man than the subject of his origin and destiny. We do not mean to say that nothing actually so much engages his attention, for this, unfortunately, is not so; but that nothing should so much interest his mind and heart, must be admitted by every one who reflects. Whence am I? whither do I go, and what shall be my future destiny? Who is not infinitely concerned in these great questions?

      Life and death are introduced to us in the opening chapters of human history. In the first, we are presented with the origin of life; in the second, with the origin of death. God is the author of the one, Satan of the other. Life and all that is from God is good; death and all that is from the devil is evil. Life is a creation; it is derived; it had a beginning; and hence is not, necessarily and essentially, eternal. The Scriptures nowhere assert the essential eternity of human life. Even before the fall--in the primitive state of paradisaical purity and innocence--Adam and Eve enjoyed a life that required to be nourished and sustained by influences out of itself--a life that needed food to make it immortal. Hence among the trees of the Garden, there is one, with virtue above all the rest--"the tree of life," a life-giving tree.

      Whether we regard this tree as literally contributing the pabulum of life--the essence and element of immortality, directly, as an elixir vitae; or rather as a sacramental fruit, in and through which, it pleased the Creator to confer this power of life by endless divine communication, does not materially affect the question. In the first case, the fruit of the tree must be supposed to draw this power, not from the created sources of its own life, for they could not impart what was not in them, to wit, the power of immortality; but from the original and eternal fountain of life, which is God himself. In the second view, this power flows into man through the eating of this fruit, sacramentally, that is through the divine appointment, and not by any process which we can call natural. In either case, therefore, the source of the life is originally in God; but in the latter, there seems to be a harmony with the conception of elementary simplicity [585] in the principle of life, that we do not so readily perceive in the former of these views.

      Life is not organization--it is distinct from it. It is rather the cause of organization. The organization of each particular life had its beginning in a previous life, but it is sustained and perpetuated by the life that is communicated to it. The organization of Adam was from God, and was first made before the breath of life was breathed into it by the Elohim. After this, the life thus divinely communicated, sustained and perpetuated the organization--the body. But the life itself is not necessarily immortal. It needs the sustaining supplies of the eternal fountain, and for this there is provided "The tree of life." The difference between this tree and all the other trees of the Garden of which man was permitted freely to eat, was this: they sustained the organization by the assimilative and organific power of the principle of life, but "The tree of life" sustained the principle of life itself. Now we can understand how an organization like the body, which is not simple, but composed of many elements, can be formed and sustained out of supplies furnished to the assimilative and organific power of life, in what we call a natural way; but we can not so understand the support and perpetuation of life itself, which is simple, and not compound. It must be given, not as something else, a heterogeneous compound to be, digested and wrought up into the product we call life, but as life itself--simple and pure, for what is the power that can take of the tree of life and digest life out of it? It is not the power of life, for this would be to make a finite power the origin of itself, which is absurd. It is not the organization, for the organization is itself, the effect of the power of life, and this would be to make an effect the cause of its own cause--an instance of reasoning in a circle, that the merest tyro in logic can not fail to perceive. Since, therefore, life must evermore be sustained by direct supplies from the eternal and original fountain in God, we prefer the view, which regards "the tree of life" as a sacramental medium, through the eating of which, just as in the symbols of the Lord's Supper, our first parents were furnished with supplies of life, directly by God, from whom originally we came, and in whom alone, perpetually, we live and move and have our being.

      But whether naturally or sacramentally, the tree of life was designed to maintain in man the power of an endless life. It was placed in the midst of Paradise, and the freest access to it, and participation of its life-giving fruit, were granted to the happy occupants of the Garden of delights. There was no interruption of this high privilege so long as they continued to observe the only condition upon which it was suspended. Access to it was life. Separation from it was death, The awful hour of disobedience was the hour of this [586] separation, and so through disobedience death came. The forbidden fruit was plucked; the test of fealty was broken, and practical infidelity becomes the sin for which banishment and death are inflicted upon the first transgressors.

      But though man is excluded from the garden, and the tree of life is carefully and powerfully guarded against his approach, by the symbolic cherubim, yet he does not leave his native and happy home without fond remembrances of its immortal fruit, and the divinely implanted hope of an ultimate return to its forfeited blessings. The away is guarded, but the tree still remains. Its fruit is still the sacramental medium of immortal life; and the longing of the soul for its life-giving power is the earnest of its future enjoyment. And so the hope of immortality springs up in the human soul from the inherited memory of the tree of life, which, like a divine intimation, descends to us with the experience of the fall, to soften its hardships, and lift us from the tyranny and hopelessness of despair, up to the anticipation of a blessed return to eternal life.

      With the sentence of death resting upon him, and the consciousness of corruption and decay already working in him, and in the absence of a positive promise of a future, return to the tree of life, Adam would have despaired. He would have seen in his approaching death the extinguishment, to him, of all being. The idea of immortality would indeed have remained, a relic from the wreck of Paradise;--but the hope of it must rest upon a ground of faith, and this faith upon the foundation of a divine promise. Without such a promise, man might indeed dream over the thought of an immortal, blissful future, and indulge his soul in happy pictures of an imaginary paradise to come, but the, sad misgivings of his calmer moments of reason, would dash from his lips the pleasing chalice, and leave him with the consciousness of the stern reality, that he is, apart from the divine promise, "without hope and without God in the world."

      The question whether the unaided reason can arrive at, or demonstrate, the idea of immortality, is clearly one for which them is left no necessity in the field of investigation, because it is unquestionably one of tradition. What could be more indelibly impressed upon the mind of Adam, than this great idea? It was this that led him, evermore, to eat of the fruit of the tree of life. It was this that the tree of life symbolized and sacramentally communicated; and it was from this that he was cut off because of transgression, and by his banishment from Eden. And would he not tell of it--talk about it to Seth, and Enos, and Cainan, and Mahalaleel, and Jared, and Enoch, and Methusaleh, with whom he was cotemporary for 243 years? And would not Methuselah tell it to Noah, with whom he was cotemporary for 600 years? And would not Noah tell it to Shem, and Shem [587] to Abraham, with whom he was cotemporary 150 years? And from Abraham could it fail to come fresh and unquestioned to Joseph, through Isaac and Jacob, and from Joseph to Amram, and from Amram to Moses--the immortal historian of this divine tradition? It is idle, therefore, to assume that the idea of immortality is to be derived through reasoning, when we have so clear and satisfactory a traditional origin for it, in the direct knowledge of Adam while in the Garden of Eden.

      The tree of life, therefore, we must regard as the sacramental symbol of immortality, and this "pleasing hope, this fond desire, this longing after immortality," as the original instinct of our first parents, which led them to the tree of life for the replenishment of their wasting power, and which still turns the hearts of all their children with fond anticipation to the time of a blessed restoration to its life-giving fruit.

      But, under the sentence of banishment from this medium, of life because of sin, upon what ground can man expect to return to its enjoyment, save that of acquittal or pardon? The cherubim guard the way, and though the tree of life is still blooming in the sweet fields of Eden, we can not of ourselves approach it. Condemned to die through the power of Satan, we can only hope to live again through the bruising of his head. Forbidden to eat because of unrighteousness, we can only return to the privilege through righteousness. It is in the promise of the seed of the woman, then, that this instinctive desire for immortality becomes a well grounded hope, and though death meets us this side of the cherubim-guarded portals and lays us low, yet in the very jaws of the grave the death-Destroyer comes to our aid with the promised deliverance, and carries us over to the sunny banks of the river of the water of life, and to the tree whose fruit is for the healing of the nations.

W. K. P. [588]      

Source:

W. K. Pendleton. "The Tree of Life." The Millennial Harbinger 35 (December 1864): 529-532.

[MHA1 585-588]