(Scripture Reading Exercise.)

"LIFE FROM LIFE"—SPIRITUAL LIFE FROM SPIRIT (Continued).

SPECIAL TEXT: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall he: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (I John iii:2, 3.)

DISCUSSION.

1. The Spiritual Man Contrasted with the Natural: If it shall be asked what it is that constitutes the difference between the natural man and the spiritual man, the answer, though necessarily brief, can take on various forms; but in the last analysis it will be found to consist in one thing: One has been "born again"—"born of the Spirit;" the other has not. One has received the Holy Ghost; the other has not.

One has the power to "know that Jesus is the Christ," the other has no such power.^[A]

[Footnote A: "No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." I Cor. xii:3.]

The body of one is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in him, which he has of God, and he is God's, in body and in Spirit;^[A] the other is in no such relationship to God.

[Footnote A: I Cor. vi:19, 20.]

One through aceptance of the atonement of the Christ has "access by one Spirit unto the Father,"^[A] the other has not.

[Footnote A: Ephesians ii:18, and context.]

One is "strengthened with might by his [God's] spirit in the inner man,"^[A] the other is not.

[Footnote A: Ibid iii:16.]

One has received the sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth;^[A] the other has not.

[Footnote A: II Thess. ii:13.]

One knows that he dwells in God and God in him, because God hath given him of his Spirit;^[A] the other has no such witness.

[Footnote A: I John iv:13.]

One is under "the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus," is made "free from the law of sin and death;" the other is not; "for they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit; for to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."

Paul runs the parallel between the spiritual man and the carnal or natural man much further and beautifully: "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together."^[A]

[Footnote A: Romans viii:1-17.]

2. The Terms Used to Express the Contrast: I have chosen to put the distinction between the natural man and the spiritual man—the man unbaptized of the Spirit and the one born of the Spirit—in terms that include direct reference to the Holy Ghost. It may be put into terms that refer directly to the Christ, such, for example, as "know ye not your own selves how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" This said to those who had received the Gospel.^[A] "Your bodies are members of Christ."^[B] "At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you."^[C] "I am the vine, ye are the branches."^[D] "I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."^[E]

[Footnote A: II Cor. xii:5.]

[Footnote B: I Cor. vi:15.]

[Footnote C: St. John xiv:10.]

[Footnote D: St. John xv:4.]

[Footnote E: Gal. ii:20.]

All which, however, amounts to the same thing; viz.,—those born of the spirit live in God, and God in them. They have received something that the spiritually unborn have not received; and though they may carry that precious thing in earthen vessels, yet is it there. There has come down into such spirit-baptized men a spirit-life which has touched their souls, and left there a spirit life that is deathless, and will grow until it conforms the man receiving it to its own image, and likeness, and quality, unless sinned against to the point of blasphemy. Of which more later.

3. The Process of Regeneration: "What can be gathered on the surface as to the process of regeneration in the individual soul," asks Henry Drummond. "From the analogies of biology," he continues, "we should expect three things: First, that the new life should dawn suddenly; second, that it should come "without observation;" third, that it should develop gradually. On two of these points there can be little controversy. The gradualness of growth is a characteristic which strikes the simplest observer. Long before the word Evolution was coined Christ applied it in this very connection—"First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." It is well known also to those who study the parables of nature that there is an ascending scale of slowness as we rise in the scale of life. Growth is most gradual in the highest forms. Man attains his maturity after a score of years; the monad completes its humble cycle in a day. What wonder if development be tardy in the Creature of Eternity? A Christian's sun has sometimes set, and a critical world has seen as yet no corn in the ear. As yet? "As yet," in this long life, has not begun. Grant him the years proportionate to his place in the scale of life. 'The time of harvest is not yet!'"

"Again, in addition to being slow, the phenomena of growth are secret. Life is invisible. When the New Life manifests itself it is a surprise. Thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. When the plant lives whence has the life come? When it dies whither has it gone? Thou canst not tell; * * * so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

"Yet once more—and this is a point of strange and frivolous dispute —this life comes suddenly. This is the only way in which life can come. Life cannot come gradually—health can, structure can, but not life. A new theology has laughed at the doctrine of conversion. Sudden conversion especially has been ridiculed as untrue to philosophy and impossible to human nature. We may not be concerned in buttressing any theology because it is old. But we find that this old theology is scientific. There may be cases—they are probably in the majority—where the moment of contact with the living spirit, though sudden, has been obscure. But the real moment and the conscious moment are two different things. Science pronounces nothing as to the conscious moment. If it did it would probably say that that was seldom the real moment—just as in the natural life the conscious moment is not the real moment. The moment of birth in the natural world is not a conscious moment—we do not know we are born till long afterward. Yet there are men to whom the origin of the new life in time has been no difficulty. To Paul, for instance, Christ seems to have come at a definite period of time, the exact moment and second of which could have been known. And this is certainly, in theory at least, the normal origin of life, according to the principles of biology. The line between the living and the dead is a sharp line. When the dead atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, are seized upon by life, the organism at first is very lowly. It possesses few functions. It has little beauty. Growth is the work of time. But life is not. That comes in a moment. At one moment it was dead; the next it lived. This is conversion, the "passing," as the Bible calls it, "from death unto life." Those who have stood by another's side at the solemn hour of this dread possession have been conscious sometimes of an experience which words are not allowed to utter—a something like the sudden snapping of a chain, the waking from a dream."^[A] And as it is in death, so it is in life—life comes suddenly; as at the last moment it departs suddenly.

[Footnote A: "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," pp. 91-94.]

4. Conformity to Type: The Spiritual life of God once established in man—what then? What is to come of it? "Beloved," said one of old, "now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man who has this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure."^[A] "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."^[B] "And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. * * * For whom he did fore know, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son." All which means that man receiving into his soul spirit-life from God, that spirit-life will conform and transform the man receiving it to itself, until man is brought into perfect union with God.^[C] If it were expressed in terms of biology one would say that the spirit life imparted to man would conform to its type, making man's spirit conform to God's spirit, to the type of the Christ.

[Footnote A: I John iii:2, 3.]

[Footnote B: II Cor. iii:18.]

[Footnote C: On this head the Prophet of the New Dispensation of the Gospel, Joseph Smith, has a fine passage: "If you wish to go where God is, you must be like God, or possess the principles which God possesses, for it we are not drawing towards God in principle, we are going from Him, and drawing towards the devil. . . . A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power in the other world, as evil spirits will have more knowledge, and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth. Hence it needs revelation to assist us, and give us knowledge of the things of God." (Minutes of April Conference, 1842. History of the Church, Vol. IV, p. 588.)]

5. The Analogy in Natural Life: Speaking of this analogy between the natural and spiritual worlds, in the matter of different kinds of life conforming to the type, Mr. Drummond says: (But before quoting let me call attention to what I have before said of using a variant phraseology on the part of Christian writers whose ideas, in part at least, we can accept, and the phraseology we of the new dispensation would use. I have said in subdivision 2 of this Lesson, that the idea of being born of the spirit may be put in various terms, in terms that have direct reference to the Holy Ghost, or terms may be used that refer to the Christ, or the Christ-life, it is in this last form that Mr. Drummond expresses the idea of the spirit-life in man):

"What goes on then in the animal kingdom is this—the bird-life seizes upon the bird-germ and builds it up into a bird, the image of itself. The reptile-life seizes upon another germinal speck, assimilates surrounding matter, and fashions it into a reptile. The reptile-life thus simply makes an incarnation of itself. The visible bird is simply an incarnation of the invisible bird-life.

"Now we are nearing the point where the spiritual analogy appears. It is a very wonderful analogy, so wonderful that one almost hesitates to put it into words. Yet Nature is reverent; and it is her voice to which we listen. These lower phenomena of life, she says, are but an allegory. There is another kind of life of which science as yet has taken little cognizance. It obeys the same laws. It builds up an organism into its own form. It is the Christ-life. As the bird-life builds up a bird, the image of itself, so the Christ-Life builds up a Christ, the image of Himself, in the inward nature of man. When a man becomes a Christian the natural process is this: The living Christ enters into his soul. Development begins. The quickening life seizes upon the soul, assimilates surrounding elements, and begins to fashion it. According to the great law of conformity to type this fashioning takes a specific form. It is that of the Artist who fashions. And all through life this wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet perfectly definite process, goes on "until Christ be formed" in it.

"The Christian life is not a vague effort after righteousness—an ill-defined pointless struggle for an ill-defined pointless end. Religion is no disheveled mass of aspiration, prayer, and faith. There is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in Biology. There is much mystery in Biology. We know all but nothing of life yet, nothing of development. There is the same mystery in the spiritual life. But the great lines are the same, as decided, as luminous; and the laws of natural and spiritual are the same as unerring, as simple. Will everything else in the natural world unfold its order, and yield to science more and more a vision of harmony, and religion, which should complement and perfect all, remain a chaos? From the standpoint of revelation no truth is more obscure than conformity to type. If science can furnish a companion phenomenon from an every-day process of the natural life, it may at least throw this most mystical doctrine of Christianity into thinkable form. Is there any fallacy in speaking of the embryology of the new life? Is the analogy invalid? Are there not vital processes in the spiritual as well as in the natural world? The bird being an incarnation of the bird-life, may not the Christian be a spiritual incarnation of the Christ-life? And is there not a real justification in the processes of the new birth for such a parallel?

"Let us appeal to the record of these processes.

"In what terms does the New Testament describe them? The answer is sufficiently striking. It uses everywhere the language of biology. It is impossible that the New Testament writers should have been familiar with these biological facts. It is impossible that their views of this great truth should have been as clear as science can make them now. But they had no alternative. There was no other way of expressing this truth. It was a biological question. So they struck out unhesitatingly into the new field of words, and, with an originality which commands both reverence and surprise, stated their truth with such light, or darkness, as they had. They did not mean to be scientific, only to be accurate, and their fearless accuracy has made them scientific.

"What could be more original, for instance, than the Apostle's reiteration that the Christian was a new creature, a new man, a babe? Or that this new man was "begotten of God," God's workmanship? And what could be a more accurate expression of the law of conformity to type than this: 'Put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him?' Or this, 'we are changed into the same image from glory to glory?' And elsewhere we are expressly told by the same writer that this conformity is the end and goal of the Christian life. To work this type in us is the whole purpose of God for man. 'Whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.'"^[A]

[Footnote A: "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," pp. 293-6.]

6. The End of the Matter—We Shall Be Like Him—Conformed to the Divine Image: That is the end then, for the spiritually born man—he will be conformed into the image of God—conformed to the type of the Spirit-life that has taken up his abode in him. How long shall it take? Who knows? And what shall it matter? The important thing is that it shall be done. The important thing for us men is that the spirit-birth takes place; that union with God be formed; the ages may wait upon the growth, and full fruitage of that event. It may take aeons of time to make a man, longer to make Super-man; but the eternal years are his who is born of the Spirit; and again I say the important thing for us men is to have that Spirit-birth, and then are we sons of God; and while it doth hot appear what we shall be, for the height and glory of that is beyond our human vision, ultimately we shall be like him, and see him as he is, and be conformed to the Christ image, that is to say, to the Divine nature—unless one shall sin against the Holy Ghost.