Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/86

82 spiritual. It is vegetable life; it is not of a very high kind; still, it is life. So the covering of the field of the mind with the tender verdure of incipient spiritual resolves is represented by the Lord's clothing the earth with grass. The growth of the mind into the bringing forth of the fruits of good efforts, based upon what we have thus far spiritually understood, is figuratively delineated by the Lord causing the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit to spring up upon the earth.

And thus we gained and explained the meaning of the first three days of creation as symbolizing the first three stages of regeneration. In the beginning of earth's creation there was chaos and darkness. Then there was brought into being—on the first day, light; on the second, the firmament; on the third, vegetable life—grass, herbs, fruit. Observe the parallel. Previous to regeneration, in the case of every person, there is ignorance or denial—spiritual darkness. The first stage or progress consists in light—mental light concerning the superior value of spiritual things. The second is in the opening of the firmament of the mind, its upper realm of the spiritual understanding. The third is in the bringing forth of the first germinations of spiritual life and the first ripened fruits of higher principles.