49. Why the tree was planted, or why its fruit was forbidden to be used, are problems which the Bible does not solve, and which set reason at defiance. 50. And then it looks like a senseless act to create a tree for the purpose of bearing fruit (as we can conceive of no other purpose for which it could have been created), and then decree that it should all go to waste. 51. It was worse still to create human beings with an appetite for this fruit, and place it in their sight, and then forbid them to taste it on penalty of death. Nothing could be more opposed to our ideas of reason and justice. 52. Did God create beings in his own image, and then treat them as if he wished to tantalize them and render them unhappy? 53. It would seem that he created man for no other purpose than to tease and torment him, and quarrel with him. 54. Common sense would suggest it to be the act of an ignoramus or a tyrant to implant in man the desire to eat fruit which he did not allow him to eat. 55. And would it not be unjust to punish Adam and Eve for doing what he himself had implanted in them the desire to do? 56. God must have known they would eat the fruit, if he were omniscient. 57. If he were not omniscient, he was not a God in a supreme or divine sense. 58. God must have had the power without the will to prevent the act of disobedience, which would make him an unjust and unmerciful tyrant. 59. Or else the will without the power, which would make him a weak and frail being, and not a God. (For a full elucidation of these points, see chapter sixty-nine.) We will notice a few other points. 60. As God declared eating the fruit would make Adam "like one of us," that is, Godlike (and all men are enjoined to become Godlike), was not Adam, therefore, justified in eating the fruit in order to become Godlike? 61. In chapter sixty-nine it is shown, that, as Adam and Eve got their eyes open by eating the inhibited fruit, the act of disobedience turned out to be a great blessing, inasmuch as it saved the earth from being filled with a race of blind human beings. 62. And, as this blessing was obtained through the agency of the serpent-devil, we must admit "the father of lies" was a great benefactor of the human race, as shown in chapter sixty-nine. 63. As Adam could not very well exercise "dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Gen. i. 26) while shut up in a little eight-by-ten garden, we can observe here another practical benefit of the act of disobedience which drove him from the garden. 64. Is it not a strange piece of moral incongruity to set Adam to tilling the soil in the garden as a _blessing_, and then doom him to till it _outside_ as a curse? (Gen. iii. 23.) He first embarked in the business as a blessing, and then as a curse. How the same act could be both a blessing and a curse is a "mystery of godliness" which swamps us.