barren. When it is said God calls a thing so, it means that in the view of the Lord so and so it is.
"And the gathering together of the waters called He seas." This is so stated because as the sea is an aggregation of many streams of water, the memory is an aggregation of many streams of knowledge. Therefore, as the gathering together of the waters means the collecting of truths in the memory, seas are used throughout the Scripture to signify the memory as the first great receptacle of spiritual knowledges in their various degrees and kinds.
"And God saw that it was good," : Everything in its order and degree is good in the sight of God. It is good that the law of order should be followed. It is good that regeneration should progress in an orderly way. It is good to gain the knowledges, facts or truths with regard to the Lord, a spiritual world, a spiritual life and other spiritual things, so as to store them away in the memory. That is it is good, if it leads on to the higher life for which only they are useful.
"And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth." Here we have the similitude which tells of the mind actually yielding its first fruits of spiritual life. The object of all religious knowledge is religious life. It is utterly useless to know of the
