III.
THE FIRST FRUITS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas; and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth bought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself after his kind; and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.—Gen. I: 9-13.
For our natural education we look to parents and teachers, for our spiritual education we go to the Lord. Instruction concerning natural things we draw from text books supplied by human learning, but spiritual instruction is obtained only from that book of Divine revelation which we are accustomed to call the Bible. It is a mistake to look for religion in a work purely scientific which has been wrought out by natural observation and deduction; but it is an error much more serious to seek for natural learning in a volume that has been revealed by the Lord for spiritual purposes alone. In the one case we simply go for information to an incompetent authority, but in the other we are belittling the Word of
