● ● ●  was the age-old problem of evil, with which she had wrestled in her own body for so many years. How could she relate it to her new vision of infinite good?

She found a clue in the fact that the first Genesis account began with light springing from God, the second with a mist going up from the earth. As long as she thought out from the perfection of God she was bound to arrive at perfection, but to start from material appearances was to become lost in confusion. The clear-cut distinction she would later make between the two Genesis accounts as presenting respectively the “true” man of God’s creating and the “false” man of mortal conceiving is present only in the most rudimentary way in these early notes, for she did not abandon at once the natural human inclination to find a logical reconciliation of the two.

The earth, like man, she described as a “reflex shadow” of the creative Principle, Spirit. So long as man recognized himself only as the shadow of Spirit, which was substance, all was well; but when he thought of himself as substance or matter, there went up a mist or false belief which confused everything. But this in effect still made God, who had given man the capacity to err, responsible for the production of false belief. Gradually it became apparent that every attempt to explain error could only legitimize it.

Eventually this led her to the conclusion that healing had its own logic—healing which did not explain error but wiped it out as an illegitimate contradiction of revealed Truth. She was then ready to present the two Genesis accounts as inspired portrayals of two opposed and irreconcilable ways of thinking, the one wholly true, the other wholly false. The arrival of her thinking at that point lay beyond the notes on Genesis, but the seed of the conclusion was implicit in the healing experience she had had in February.

To understand, to make explicit the nature of the real as she had glimpsed it at the moment of healing—here was the inspiration of those long hours she spent in her bedroom at the Ellises’ with a whole new world of ideas flooding into her mind and out from her pen. Even the changes, corrections, interlineations, crossings-out, and variant interpretations that characterize her manuscript convey the sense of an extraordinary movement of thought. She was groping for ways to  ● ● ●