Weary of its seemingly unending battle with adverse circumstances, the human heart at times cries out, "What is the reason for it all?" Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 536) asks a similar question: "Through toil, struggle, and sorrow, what do mortals attain?" Her answer is full of significance and hope: "They give up their belief in perishable life and happiness; the mortal and material return to dust, and the immortal is reached."
It is generally recognized that the first chapter of Genesis and the first three verses of the second chapter belong to a document which was written long after many of the recorded experiences of the early Hebrews took place. That these experiences had been filled with struggles, disasters, fears, and sorrows, as well as triumphs and joys, did not prevent the writer or writers of this document from stating emphatically (Gen. 1:1, 31): "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Why was the perfection of being so stoutly maintained in the face of much evidence to the contrary?
The spiritually awakened human consciousness recognizes the uninterrupted existence of harmonious divine conditions as the only reality, whereas the unillumined thought believes in the alternations of material so-called good and evil. Thus enlightened thought is able to discount events which would tend to disprove good as all. Nothing could, therefore, turn one who understands the first chapter of Genesis from the conviction that God is the infinite and sole creator of the universe, that He made a wholly good creation, and that man is God's complete and perfect expression.
