Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/26

22 aspects, He chose the creation of the earth as a fitting natural emblem whereby to express it. It is on the same principle as, when He desired to teach a lesson concerning the manner in which our Lord's word is implanted in the mind and the different mental soils in which it is received, He expressed it by the correspondence of a sower—the Lord, sowing seed—implanting truth, in the earth—the mind of man. When then it is said, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," it is a parable, and it means that in and from the beginning of each one's individual career, the Lord seeks to regenerate his internal and his external man, or what is the same, his spiritual and his natural mind; in other words, his heavenly nature and his earthly nature.

In and from the very beginning God created heaven and earth in each one's nature. There is no one who does not begin the career of life with something of heaven created in him of God. You see that something of heaven in the innocence of the infant, in the beauty of his infantile ways, in the loveliness of childhood, and in its trusting, guileless character. What becomes of these afterward is another question.

In every child's mind there is a heredity from its natural parents and a heredity from the Lord. The latter is what gives him the power of spiritual