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It is the accumulation of these revealings of the Divine will that has come down to us in our Holy Scriptures, in which we recognize the Purpose or Word of God in adaptation to the various states and conditions of men. This Word, or revelation of the Divine will, is given in man's own language and form of thought, even as our Lord Himself gave it to the people in parable. But in coming forth through heaven into man's thought and speech, the Word does not lose its Divine content. It simply embodies this in corresponding forms of lower degree. Thus this written Word is the foot of a ladder on which man and angel may ascend in thought into the presence of its Giver. Under this recognition of the spiritual and Divine content of the Scriptures incongruities in the letter are easily referable to human crudities of thought. Within, all is compatible with the infinite wisdom and love of Him whose will it reveals, full of instruction for angels and men.
The first chapter of the Book of Genesis sets forth in terms a child may in his manner apprehend the order of the Divine process of creation. Of this order the first element is the outgoing of the Divine life through successive degrees of spiritual and material substance that it creates, of less and less, even to least life. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. In the outmost, least living substance created there is yet a certain power of reaction, born of its very inertness. And the second element of the Divine order of creation is that out of this first, simple, least-living recipient through its reaction are evolved by regular—we say natural—process higher, more complex, and more living recipients, to receive higher or inner degrees of life from the One Source. The third element of this order is that this advance is made stage by stage, day after day, evening being the womb of the new morning. Evening was and morning was one day. This involves the decline of each successive stage after serving its purpose and maturing the germ for a new stage. Thus one generation of life gives way to its successor. The corn of wheat falls to the ground and dies in bringing forth a new plant, in which in new form its life is continued. The leaf falls after having formed in its axil the bud for a new shoot, and in decaying furnishes food for the new growth. Last in order, we learn that man in the image and likeness of his Creator is the first and final purpose in all creation.