Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/25

Rh for the Lord hath spoken," he refers by the heavens not to the skies above, nor by earth to the globe we inhabit, but by the latter to the people of the world, and by the former to that within their minds which is sufficiently heavenly to appreciate what the Lord may utter. In the parable of the mustard seed, when our Lord says that "the kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth is the least of all seeds," He means that the doctrine of spiritual truth, when first sown in the mind, is at first to that mind the least of all things in importance and comprehension. When the Psalmist says, "Truth shall spring out of the earth he does not mean that truth grows like a vegetable in the ground but that it comes forth from the mind of man.

So earth, when used as a Scripture symbol, signifies man or the mind of man, and heaven when so used, its spiritual or heavenly degree or plane. When they are used, as in the first verse of Genesis in juxtaposition, or in antithesis, the earth symbolizes the earthly, natural or lower plane of the mind, and the heaven, its heavenly, spiritual or higher plane. In construing this chapter as a parable, therefore, it must be so done throughout. And as the Lord, in giving his Word, would first set forth in parable the subject of regeneration or the spiritual re-creation of man, in its general progressive