Thoughts by Krauth on Paradise Lost and Regained

The first thing worthy of note in regard to the sacramental mystery is its antiquity. It meets us at the threshold of the divine history of our race. In Eden we see already the idea of natural and supernatural eating...

The great loss of Paradise Lost was that of the Sacrament of Life, of that food, in, with and under which was given immortality, so objectively, so positively, and really that even fallen man would have been made deathless by it: "Now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever," Gen. iii.22. The great gain of Paradise Regained is that of the Sacrament of Life. Christ says: "I am the life;" "The bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." The cross of Christ is the tree of life, and He the precious fruit borne by heavenly grace upon it. The cross is the centre of Paradise Regained, as the tree of life was the centre of the first Paradise. Christ's body is the organ of the life purchased by His obedience and death. The Holy Supper is the sacrament of that body, and, through that body, the sacrament of the life which that body brings....

In the Garden of Eden was a moral miniature of the universe; and with the act of eating were associated the the two great realms of the natural and supernatural; and with this was connected the idea of the one as a means of entering the other, of the natural as the means of entering into the supernatural. There were natural trees, with purely natural properties, whose fruit was eaten naturally, and whose benefits were simply natural; bodily eating, terminating in bodily sustenance. But there was also the natural terminating in the supernatural. There were two tress, striking their roots into the same soil, lifting their branches in the same air - natural trees - but bearing, by Heaven's ordinance, in, with, and under their fruitage, supernatural properties. We call it a sacramental tree, because it did not merely symbolize life, or signify it; but, by God's appointment, so gave life - in, with, and under its fruit - that to receive the fruit was to receive life. The fruit which man there could have eaten was the communion of life. - Conservative Reformation pp. 585-587

Just a teasing taste - this entire section is among the very best in a consistently outstanding book.