HISTORY has proven that the unfoldment of ideas in universal consciousness is identical with the awakening of the individual consciousness, so that we may legitimately draw a parallelism between our own spiritual awakening and that of the race. The record of creation, as given in the first chapter of Genesis and extending to the fourth verse of the second chapter, symbolizes the experience of each individual consciousness as it enters into and grasps the truth concerning God, the universe, and man. Since time is eternity, without beginning or end, we are forced to regard God's universe, all the ideas through which Mind expresses itself, as having existed simultaneously with and as being perfect as the Mind which thinks them. Further than that, as we study in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" the chapter called Genesis, we are forced to the logical conclusion that the first chapter of Genesis is not only an account of creation as God brought it about, but is also an outline of the successive stages through which the human mind passes as it spiritually awakens to the true Science of being, with its only cause and its only right conclusion.
To the Christian Scientist who understands the way in which God works and also the counterfeit way in which error claims to work, it may appear significant that the inspired word presents heaven first, then earth; while mortal mind, reversing the order, regards heaven as the unattained type of consciousness. Heaven, typifying the atmosphere of truth, would, to human sense, consistently appear before earth or the fixed ideas which are formulated in consciousness. When truth first finds us beset by material cares or perhaps submerged in worldly pleasures, impelled by human will and perplexed by the variableness of human relationships, it finds us groping in darkness and almost lost in a wilderness of human fear.
Looking back on such a mental condition, we sometimes wonder that a spiritual awakening could ever have come. We find, however, that while "darkness was upon the face of the deep," the Spirit of good already brooded over that darkened consciousness with its unformed elements of thought, until the good within us responded with the desire for light. We learn in Christian Science that "desire is prayer," and that "the desire which goes forth hungering after righteousness is blessed of our Father, and it does not return unto us void" (Science and Health, pp. i. 2). So we find the undisputed answer to prayer in the words, "And there was light." Truly, light had always been present, but consciousness had to be awakened through desire in order to grasp it. With this wondrous light flooding our consciousness, hope and faith awaken. We have gained that which helps us to determine right from wrong. We are no longer in doubt concerning our purpose in life nor tempted to question man's inheritance as a child of God. We have now found the divine Principle which clearly divides the light from the darkness and enables us to see that darkness is mere shadow—nothingness.
