IN her book "Retrospection and Introspection," Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 87), "The poet's line, 'Order is heaven's first law,' is so eternally true, so axiomatic, that it has become a truism; and its wisdom is as obvious in religion and scholarship as in astronomy or mathematics." Order in astronomy and mathematics is self-evident. Let us see how it appertains to religion and scholarship. Mrs. Eddy found divine order clearly exposited throughout the Bible. Through her tireless, consecrated study of the Scriptures, heaven's law of order was revealed to her as establishing and governing all true being, and she found this perfect order to be manifested not as a fixed or static condition, but as perpetually active and infinitely progressive.
Especially is this orderly progression presented in the teachings of Christ Jesus in his parable of the sower, recorded in the fourth chapter of Mark's Gospel. Here this teaching is epitomized in the twenty-eighth verse: "First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." Is not our Leader's whole, great lifework an example of divinity's order "in religion and scholarship"—spiritual understanding progressively gained through prayer and study?
All disorder stems from the false belief in a mortal, material mind apart from God. Mortal mind's disorders are the supposititious reversal of the divine order. Lust, envy, malice, dishonesty, hate, disease, and suffering of all kinds are types of disorder. But Christian Science, the Word of God, proves all disorders to be nothing more than the phantasms of mortal mind, reinstates divine order, and verifies the statement in Ecclesiastes (3:14), "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it."
