(Scripture Reading Exercise.)

"LIFE FROM LIFE"—SPIRITUAL LIFE FROM SPIRIT.

SPECIAL TEXT: "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (I Cor. ii:14.)

DISCUSSION.

1. The Gospel the Power of God Unto Salvation: We have now reached the place in the development of our theme where it takes on a strong personal interest. The gospel is the "power of God unto salvation."^[A] It is so for us—for all men. "Ye must be born again; * * * except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God."^[B] Is this new birth possible to all? We must needs think so if the Gospel is available to all; and that is a fact so patent to both justice and revelation that it requires no discussion. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life." This alone sufficiently proclaims the universal right of men to the hopes and to the saving powers of the Gospel. "Ye must be born again!" "Born of the water and of the Spirit." Then with that new birth will there come new life? And what will that life be? "That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is Spirit,"^[C] said the Christ. Spirit birth then is the aim of the Christian baptism—baptism of water and of the Spirit being the two parts of the one thing, the first being preparatory for and leading up to the second, its complement. And with this there draws tremendous consequences.

[Footnote A: Rom. i:16.]

[Footnote B: St. John iii:5.]

[Footnote C: St. John iii:6.]

2. Spiritual Biogenesis: Spirit Life from Spirit Life: Henry Drummond in his "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" has a chapter entitled "Biogenesis"—meaning thereby that life comes from life, and he holds that life can come in no other way than from life, and contravenes the theory that life comes of spontaneous generation. "So far as science can settle anything," he observes, "this question is settled. The attempt to get the living out of the dead has failed. Spontaneous generation has had to be given up. And it is now recognized on every hand that Life can only come from the touch of Life. Huxley categorically announces that the doctrines of Biogenesis, or life only from life, is "victorious along the whole line at the present day."^[A] And even whilst confessing that he wishes the evidence were the other way, Tyndall is compelled to say, "I affirm that no shred of trustworthy experimental testimony exists to prove that life i our day has ever appeared independently of antecedent life."^[B]

[Footnote A: "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley, F. R. S., p. 239.]

[Footnote B: Nineteenth Century Review, 1878, p. 507.]

Our author parallels this fact of "life from life" in the spiritual world, and holds it to be as rigidly true in the one world as in the other. "The Spiritual Life," he holds to be "the gift of the Living Spirit."

The theory opposed to this is "that a man may become gradually better and better until in the course of the process he reaches that quality of religious nature known as 'Spiritual Life.' This Life is not something added as extra to the natural man; it is the normal and appropriate development of the natural man." This theory parallels the theory of spontaneous generation in natural life. To this Drummond opposes "Biogenesis"—the law of life from life in the spiritual world. "The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man. He is a New Creation born from above. As well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living until in course of the process it reached vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain the Eternal Life."

Our author then draws a strong parallel between the natural and spiritual kingdoms on this subject of biogenesis—"life from life."

3. The Law of Biogenesis in the Natural World: "Let us first place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two great kingdoms of nature, the inorganic and organic, as these now stand in the light of the Law of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there is no Spontaneous Generation of Life? It is meant that the passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked off from the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of Life. Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality, without this preliminary contact with Life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere for ever. It is a very mysterious Law which guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in Nature more worth pondering for its strangeness it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the Law of Biogenesis and denied for ever the possibility of resurrection within itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in Nature that Science has long and urgently sought to obliterate it. Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern persistency that the assaults upon this Law for number and thoroughness have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test. Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical Laws may explain the inorganic world: the biological Laws may account for the development of the organic. But of the point where they meet, of that strange borderland between the dead and the living. Science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands of Nature, but reserved a point at the genesis of Life for His direct appearing.

"The power of the analogy, for which we are laying the foundations, to seize and impress the mind, will largely depend on the vividness with which one realizes the gulf which Nature places between the living and the dead. But those who, in contemplating Nature, have found their attention arrested by this extraordinary dividing-line severing the visible universe eternally into two: those who in watching the progress of science have seen barrier after barrier disappear—barrier between plant and plant, between animal and animal, and even between animal and plant—but this gulf yawning more hopelessly wide with every advance of knowledge, will be prepared to attach a significance to the Law of Biogenesis and its analogies more profound perhaps than to any other fact or law in Nature. If, as Pascal says, Nature is an image of grace; if the things that are seen are in any sense the images of the unseen, there must lie in this great gulf fixed, this most unique and startling of all natural phenomena, a meaning of peculiar moment."

4. The Law of Biogenesis in the Spiritual World: "Where now in the Spiritual spheres shall we meet a companion phenomenon to this? What in the Unseen shall be likened to this deep dividing-line, or where in human experience is another barrier which never can be crossed?

"There is such a barrier. In the dim but not inadequate vision of the Spiritual World presented in the Word of God, the first thing that strikes the eye is a great gulf fixed. The passage from the Natural World to the Spiritual World is hermetically sealed on the natural side. The door from the inorganic to the organic is shut, no mineral can open it; so the door from the natural to the spiritual is shut, and no man can open it. This world of natural men is staked off from the Spiritual World by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No organic change, no modification of environment, no mental energy, no moral effort, no evolution of character, no progress of civilization can endow any single human soul with the attribute of spiritual life. The spiritual world is guarded from the world next in order beneath it by a law of Biogenesis—except a man be born again * * * except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

"It is not said, in this enunciation of the Law, that if the condition be not fulfilled the natural man will not enter the Kingdom of God. The word is cannot. For the exclusion of the spiritually inorganic from the kingdom of the spiritually organic is not arbitrary. Nor is the natural man refused admission on unexplained grounds. His admission is a scientific impossibility. Except a mineral be born "from above"—from the kingdom just above it—it cannot enter the kingdom just above it And except a man be born "from above," by the same law, he cannot enter the kingdom just above him. There being no passage from one kingdom to another, whether from inorganic to organic, or from organic [natural] to spiritual, the intervention of Life is a scientific necessity if a stone or a plant or an animal or a man is to pass from a lower to a higher sphere. The plant stretches down to the dead world beneath it, touches its minerals and gases with its mystery of life, and brings them up ennobled and transformed to the living sphere. The breath of God, blowing where it listeth, touches with its mystery of Life the dead souls of men, bears them across the bridgeless gulf between the natural and the spiritual, between the spiritually inorganic and the spiritually organic, endows them with its own high qualities, and develops within them these new and secret faculties, by which those who are born again are said to see the Kingdom of God.

5. Distinction Between the Natural and the Spiritual Man: "Our author next proceeds with the application of his principle by drawing the distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian man—between one "born of the Spirit," and one not "born of the Spirit."

"What now, let us ask specifically, distinguishes a Christian man from a non-Christian man? Is it that he has certain mental characteristics not possessed by the other? Is it that certain faculties have been trained in him, that morality assumes special and higher manifestations, and character a nobler form? Is the Christian merely an ordinary man who happens from birth to have been surrounded with a peculiar set of ideas? Is his religion merely that peculiar quality of the moral life defined by Mr. Matthew Arnold as "morality touched by emotion?" And does the possession of a high ideal, benevolent sympathies, a reverent spirit, and a favorable environment account for what men call his Spiritual Life?

"The distinction between them is the same as that between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. What is the difference between a crystal and an organism, a stone and a plant. They have much in common. Both are made of the same atoms. Both display the same properties of matter. Both are subject to the physical laws. Both may be very beautiful. But besides possessing all that the crystal has, the plant possesses something more—a mysterious something called life. This life is not something which existed in the crystal only in a less developed form. There is nothing at all like it in the crystal. There is nothing like the first beginning of it in the crystal, not a trace or symptom of it. This plant is tenanted by something new, an original and unique possession added over and above all the properties common to both. When from vegetable life we rise to animal life, here again we find something original and unique—unique at least as compared with the mineral. From animal life we ascend again to spiritual life. And here also is something new, something still more unique. He who lives the spiritual life has a distinct kind of life added to all the other phases of life which he manifests—a kind of life infinitely more distinct than is the active life of a plant from the inertia of a stone. The spiritual man is more distinct in point of fact than is the plant from the stone. This is the one possible comparison in nature, for it is the widest distinction in nature; but compared with the difference between the natural and the spiritual the gulf which divides the organic from the inorganic is a hair's breadth. The natural man belongs essentially to this present order of things. He is endowed simply with a high quality of the natural animal life. But it is life of so poor a quality that it is not life at all. He that hath not the Son hath not life; but he that hath the Son hath life—a new and distinct and supernatural endowment. He is not of this world. He is of the timeless state, of eternity. It doth not yet appear what he shall be.

"The difference then between the spiritual man and the natural man is not a difference of development, but of generation. It is a distinction of quality, not of quantity. A man cannot rise by any natural development from "morality touched by emotion," to "morality touched by life." Were we to construct a scientific classification, science would compel us to arrange all natural men, moral or immoral, educated or vulgar, as one family. One might be high in the family group, another low; yet, practically, they are marked by the same set of characteristics—they eat, sleep, work, think, live, die. But the spiritual man is removed from this family so utterly by the possession of an additional characteristic that a biologist, fully informed of the whole circumstances, would not hesitate a moment to classify him elsewhere. And if he really entered into these circumstances it would not be in another family but in another kingdom. It is an old fashioned theology which divides the world in this way—which speaks of men as Living and Dead, lost and saved—a stern theology all but fallen into disuse. This difference between the living and the dead in souls is so unproved by casual observation, so impalpable in itself, so startling as a doctrine, that schools of culture have ridiculed or denied the grim distinction. Nevertheless the grim distinction must be retained. It is a scientific distinction. "He that hath not the Son hath not Life."^[A]

[Footnote A: He that has not spiritually been born is not spiritually alive.]

"Now it is this great law which finally distinguishes Christianity from all other religions. It places the religion of Christ upon a footing altogether unique. There is no analogy between the Christian religion and, say, Buddhism or the Mohammedan religion. There is no true sense in which a man can say. He that hath Buddha hath life. Buddha has nothing to do with life. He may have something to do with morality. He may stimulate, impress, teach, guide, but there is no distinct new thing added to the souls of those who profess Buddhism. These religions may be developments of the natural, mental, or moral man. But Christianity professes to be more. It is the mental or moral man plus something else or some One else. It is the infusion into the spiritual man of a new life, of a quality unlike anything else in nature. This constitutes the separate Kingdom of Christ, and gives to Christianity alone of all the religions of mankind the strange mark of divinity.