Article July 10, 1989 Issue

Creation: spiritual and wholly good

Ethel E. Tory

Not long ago I visited a friend who had been holidaying in the country. She told me that one day as she looked at the landscape she had thought of a tree not so much as a material object but rather as something that provided shade, shelter, food, and beauty.

I at once recalled the exegesis of Genesis 1:21 in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy. The Bible states, "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good." Science and Health explains: "Spirit is symbolized by strength, presence, and power, and also by holy thoughts, winged with Love. These angels of His presence, which have the holiest charge, abound in the spiritual atmosphere of Mind, and consequently reproduce their own characteristics. Their individual forms we know not, but we do know that their natures are allied to God's nature; and spiritual blessings, thus typified, are the externalized, yet subjective, states of faith and spiritual understanding." ^{Science and Health, p. 512.}

In the opening words of these two parallel passages—"God created" and "Spirit is symbolized by"—we recognize a fundamental teaching of Christian Science, namely that God is Spirit. It follows that His creation is spiritual and that all things created express the qualities of Spirit, Soul, God. Thus a material concept of whales yields to the perception of qualities such as grandeur and power, the "strength, presence, and power" of Spirit, which created them. Likewise the fowls of the air are seen as "holy thoughts, winged with Love."

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