In the Bible we have the stories of two gardens—one a myth; the other a historical happening. In the Garden of Eden in the first book of the Old Testament we find the first fabled self-assertion of a mortal will. In the Garden of Gethsemane in the New Testament we see the most momentous, the most portentous struggle in the history of humanity against the magnetism of that mythological, self-assertive mortal willpower.
Following the divinely inspired description of spiritual creation in the first chapter of Genesis, in which God, the creative Principle, is set forth as the creator of all, making man in His own image, and making all good, we find the attempt to explain a mortal existence, in which a mortal concept of the creator as knowing and willing both good and evil brings forth its man of the substance of dust—man finding his completeness in a fellow being made of the same substance.
Here we have a pair of contrasts—the two gardens, Eden and Gethsemane, and the two biblical accounts of creation, the mortal and the spiritual.
