The 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “Order is heaven’s first law,” an often-quoted line that Mary Baker Eddy refers to as “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” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 87).
It truly is axiomatic—that is, self-evident—that “order is heaven’s first law,” because the absence of order is chaos, and chaos has no structure—therefore no identity or individuality, no expression, no beauty, no function, and no purpose. To me, one of the most stirring examples of the action of law to establish and sustain order is revealed in the breathtaking photos of our exquisitely ordered universe taken by the Hubble telescope. But it is generally thought that this magnificent celestial order is the outcome of mindless, random material forces, or laws, in operation—gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. On the contrary, Christian Science explains that the fundamental forces are actually spiritual, that “the material so-called gases and forces are counterfeits of the spiritual forces of divine Mind …” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 293).
The fact is that regardless of how material the universe and its laws appear to the material senses, the universe, everything in it, and all of the governing laws that maintain its order, are spiritual, belonging to God, Spirit. And this is precisely how the universe—including our earth—appears right now to spiritual sense. “To material sense, earth is matter; to spiritual sense, it is a compound idea,” the Christian Science textbook explains (Science and Health, p. 585). The glorious truth of the spirituality of man, universe, and law—right where these appear to material sense to be material—was revealed through the ministry of Christ Jesus, who unequivocally demonstrated the fact that all laws of physics yield to divine metaphysics.
