MANY centuries have passed since the scribe used his metaphor of a garden to record the early chapters of human history. It has remained for Christian Science to turn its dazzling searchlight upon these early records of the race and expose the whole vast material fraud. With its lens turned down the path of the present and of the time to come, its white glory plays upon the walls of the new heaven and the new earth—that spiritual reality which was in the beginning, and is now, and ever shall be, God's eternal expression, and which must finally be fully understood and accepted.
The Biblical account of creation, given in the first chapter of Genesis and the first five verses of the second, is the true account of spiritual creation. Here light exists without solar beams; here the firmament of spiritual understanding is seen to unfold the creative power, Spirit; here understanding is unified with harmony; here the unformed thoughts of Spirit are gathered and unfolded in revelation of the divine purpose; here the continuity of identity—the seed in itself—is revealed. Here, too, it is clearly set forth that creation emanates from God, creative Mind, and is therefore clearly spiritual. Every plant of the field was created "before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: . . . and there was not a man to till the ground." Nor, if we are to give to Spirit, the only real Being, the glory of constructing His own universe out of the only existent substance—Spirit—was there any material ground to till.
But a sense of ignorance of the nature of God and the universe seems later to have arisen. Now, ignorance is not a positive quality; it is entirely negative. With the sixth verse of the second chapter of Genesis begins the record of the negation. Unmistakably, this chapter records the first man-made creed, the doctrine of pantheism, opposing itself to Spirit and endeavoring to set up a kingdom of dust. "The ground" is here purported to be the basis of creation.
