Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/120

116 soul begins, for the first time, in a really spiritual sense, to live. Our love, faith and knowledge now begin to become really living energies. They give spiritual vitality to all we desire, think and do. True, they will not prove to be of the most intensely vital kind even yet. Still there will be stumbling and falling. Old states which are of earth, earthy, will, at times, cloud, for a brief while, the life. Thoughts of the flesh pots of Egypt will, occasionally, lure us back to our worldly ways. But, not-withstanding this, we will have here experienced a consciousness of the Lord's presence and life in all things about us, in all we have and are, in our faculties and powers, in our knowledges and affections, in our aspirations and desires, which will create a longing for the time when we can rest forever in Him. To rest in Him is to rest in this consciousness of his perpetual influence and presence.

To be alive then, spiritually, is to feel the Lord's presence and influence as energizing our onward way. To vegetate, spiritually, is to acknowledge the fact after an intelligent manner, but to lack the conscious feeling of that presence—the realized sphere of that influence. In this we now see more clearly by comparison the two symbolisms the springing forth of vegetation on the third day and the bringing forth of living creatures on the fifth day. The one is the correspondence under which