son, then of love, until the full fruits of a rich spiritual life are brought to maturity.
The Sacred Scripture makes use of this symbol in all its parts. When the Psalmist exclaims to the Lord, "All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee,": it is meant that all the minds shall so worship and sing. When he says that "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord," he means that the minds of his people shall be filled with that knowledge. And so our Lord, in teaching that regeneration, or the development of the mind on spiritual lines, is a gradual work, calls the mind of man the earth "which bringeth forth fruit; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear."
The symbol as used in Genesis is the same. The creation of the earth is a parable of the regeneration of the mind. At first—so the narrative reads—the earth is a mere voidness and emptiness, and darkness is on the face of the deep; that is, the mind of man, before regeneration begins, is formless and void as to genuine goodness and truth, and the darkness of ignorance in reference to spiritual things rests upon its deeps.
As the great feature of the first day of creation was the fiat of God—"Let there be light!" so the main feature of the first stage of regeneration is the dispersion of the mind's ignorance and its obtain-
