motives for which we should live, and the genuine spiritual results we should seek to attain. We put these in practice; we weave them into our understandings and lives; or rather, we use the means which the Lord has provided, and the spiritual power with which He has furnished us, to do this. We develop out of worldliness and selfishness into angelhood. We become fitted to live in the eternal mansions of the blessed in the great hereafter, and to perform the uses and live the lives which will be required of us there. Regeneration is the process through which we pass, the work of shunning evils as sins against God which we perform, the radical change of will and thought, of heart and mind, which is made within us, as we gradually emerge from the low plane of merely natural and sensuous existence to the highest levels of life, which is summed up in a state of love to the Lord and the neighbor.
The history of the creation is not natural science but spiritual parable. It is not a revelation of the process of the world's formation; it is a spiritual account of the re-formation of heart and mind. So the six days of creation represent the six general states through which all regenerating persons have to pass. At first our minds are without form and void, and darkness rests upon the faces of their deeps. Totally so is this the case in infancy. Not only is
