BIOGENESIS
"What we require is no new Revelation, but
simply an adequate conception of the true essence of Christianity. And I
believe that, as time goes on, the work of the Holy Spirit will be continuously
shown in the gradual insight which the human race will attain into the true
essence of the Christian religion. I am thus of opinion that a standing miracle
exists, and that it has ever existed--a direct and continued influence
exerted by the supernatural on the natural."
PARADOXICAL PHILOSOPHY.
"He that hath the Son hath Life, and he that hath
not the Son of God hath not Life."--John.
"Omne vivum ex vivo."--Harvey.
FOR two hundred years the scientific world
has been rent with discussions upon the Origin of Life. Two great schools have
defended exactly opposite views --one that matter can spontaneously generate
life, the other that life can only come from pre-existing life. The doctrine of
Spontaneous Generation, as the first is called, has been revived within recent
years by Dr. Bastian, after a series of elaborate experiments on the Beginnings
of Life. Stated in his own words, his conclusion is this: "Both observation and
experiment unmistakeably testify to the fact that living matter is
constantly being formed de novo, in obedience to the same laws and
tendencies which determine all the more simple chemical combinations."[33] Life, that is to say, is not the Gift of
Life. It is capable of springing into being of itself. It can be Spontaneously
Generated.
This announcement called into the field a phalanx
of observers, and the highest authorities in biological science engaged
themselves afresh upon the problem. The experiments necessary to test the
matter can be followed or repeated by any one possessing the slightest
manipulative skill. Glass vessels are three-parts filled with infusions of hay
or any organic matter. They are boiled to kill all germs of life, and
hermetically sealed to exclude the outer air. The air inside, having been
exposed to the boiling temperature for many hours, is supposed to be likewise
dead; so that any life which may subsequently appear in the closed flasks must
have sprung into being of itself. In Bastian's experiments, after every
expedient to secure sterility, life did appear inside in myriad quantity.
Therefore, he argued, it was spontaneously generated.
But the phalanx of observers found two errors in
this calculation. Professor Tyndall repeated the same experiment, only with a
precaution to ensure absolute sterility suggested by the most recent science--a
discovery of his own. After every care, he conceived there might still be
undestroyed germs in the air inside the flasks. If the air were absolutely
germless and pure, would the myriad-life appear? He manipulated his
experimental vessels in an atmosphere which under the high test of optical
purity--the most delicate known test--was absolutely germless. Here not a
vestige of life appeared. He varied the experiment in every direction, but
matter in the germless air never yielded life.
The other error was detected by Mr. Dallinger. He
found among the lower forms of life the most surprising and indestructible
vitality. Many animals could survive much higher temperatures than Dr. Bastian
had applied to annihilate them. Some germs almost refused to be
annihilated--they were all but fire-proof.
These experiments have practically closed the
question. A decided and authoritative conclusion has now taken its place in
science. So far as science can settle anything, 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 recognised on every hand that Life can
only come from the touch of Life. Huxley categorically announces that the
doctrine of Biogenesis, or life only from life, is "victorious along the whole
line at the present day."[34] 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 in our day has ever appeared independently of
antecedent life."[35]
For much more than two hundred years a similar
discussion has dragged its length through the religious world. Two great
schools here also have defended exactly opposite views--one that the Spiritual
Life in man can only come from pre-existing Life, the other that it can
Spontaneously Generate itself. Taking its stand upon the initial statement of
the Author of the Spiritual Life, one small school, in the face of derision and
opposition, has persistently maintained the doctrine of Biogenesis. Another,
larger and with greater pretension to philosophic form, has defended
Spontaneous Generation. The weakness of the former school consists--though this
has been much exaggerated--in its more or less general adherence to the extreme
view that religion had nothing to do with the natural life; the weakness of the
latter lay in yielding to the more fatal extreme that it had nothing to do with
anything else. That man, being a worshipping animal by nature, ought to
maintain certain relations to the Supreme Being, was indeed to some extent
conceded by the naturalistic school, but religion itself was looked upon
as a thing to be spontaneously generated by the evolution of character in the
laboratory of common life.
The difference between the two positions is
radical. Translating from the language of Science into that of Religion, the
theory of Spontaneous Generation is simply that a man may become gradually
better and better until in course of the process he reaches that quality of
religious nature known as Spiritual Life. This Life is not something added
ab extra to the natural man; it is the normal and appropriate
development of the natural man. Biogenesis opposes to this the whole doctrine
of Regeneration. The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living Spirit. 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.
The advocates of Biogenesis in Religion have
founded their argument hitherto all but exclusively on Scripture. The relation
of the doctrine to the constitution and course of Nature was not disclosed. Its
importance, therefore, was solely as a dogma; and being directly concerned with
the Supernatural, it was valid for those alone who chose to accept the
Supernatural.
Yet it has been keenly felt by those who attempt
to defend this doctrine of the origin of the Spiritual Life, that they have
nothing more to oppose to the rationalistic view than the ipse dixit of
Revelation. The argument from experience, in the nature of the case, is seldom
easy to apply, and Christianity has always found at this point a genuine
difficulty in meeting the challenge of Natural Religions. The direct authority
of Nature, using Nature in its limited sense, was not here to be sought for, On
such a question its voice was necessarily silent; and all that the apologist
could look for lower down was a distant echo or analogy. All that is really
possible, indeed, is such an analogy; and if that can now be found in
Biogenesis, Christianity in its most central position secures at length a
support and basis in the Laws of Nature.
Up to the present time the analogy required has
not been forthcoming. There was no known parallel in Nature for the spiritual
phenomena in question. But now the case is altered. With the elevation of
Biogenesis to the rank of a scientific fact, all problems concerning the Origin
of Life are placed on a different footing. And it remains to be seen whether
Religion cannot at once re-affirm and re-shape its argument in the light of
this modern truth.
If the doctrine of the Spontaneous Generation of
Spiritual Life can be met on scientific grounds, it will smear the removal of
the most serious enemy Christianity has to deal with, and especially within its
own borders, at the present day. The religion of Jesus has probably always
suffered more from those who have misunderstood than from those who have
opposed it. Of the multitudes who confess Christianity at this hour how many
have clear in their minds the cardinal distinction established by its Founder
between "born of the flesh" and "born of the Spirit"? By how many teachers of
Christianity even is not this fundamental postulate persistently ignored? A
thousand modern pulpits every seventh day are preaching the doctrine of
Spontaneous Generation. The finest and best of recent poetry is coloured with
this same error. Spontaneous Generation is the leading theology of the modern
religious or irreligious novel; and much of the most serious and cultured
writing of the day devotes itself to earnest preaching of this impossible
gospel. The current conception of the Christian religion in short--the
conception which is held not only popularly but by men of culture--is founded
upon a view of its origin which, if it were true, would render the whole scheme
abortive.
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.[36] But those who, in
contemplating Nature, have found their attention arrested by his 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 yawn 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.
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 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.
What is the evidence for this great gulf
fixed at the portals of the Spiritual World? Does Science close this gate, or
Reason, or Experience, or Revelation? We reply, all four. The initial
statement, it is not to be denied, reaches us from Revelation. But is not this
evidence here in court? Or shall it be said that any argument deduced from this
is a transparent circle--that after all we simply come back to the
unsubstantiality of the ipse dixit? Not altogether, for the analogy
lends an altogether new authority to the ipse dixit. How substantial
that argument really is, is seldom realized. We yield the point here much too
easily. The right of the Spiritual World to speak of its own phenomena is as
secure as the right of the Natural World to speak of itself. What is Science
but what the Natural World has said to natural men? What is Revelation but what
the Spiritual World has said to Spiritual men? Let us at least ask what
Revelation has announced with reference to this Spiritual Law of Biogenesis;
afterwards we shall inquire whether Science, while endorsing the verdict, may
not also have some further vindication of its title to be heard.
The words of Scripture which preface this inquiry
contain an explicit and original statement of the Law of Biogenesis for the
Spiritual Life. "He What hath the Son hath Life, and he that hath not the Son
of God hath not Life." Life, that is to say, depends upon contact with Life. It
cannot spring up of itself. It cannot develop out of anything that is not Life.
There is no Spontaneous Generation in religion any more than in Nature. Christ
is the source of Life in the Spiritual World; and he that hath the Son hath
Life, and he that hath not the Son, whatever else he may have, hath not Life.
Here, in short, is the categorical denial of Abiogenesis and the establishment
in this high field of the classical formula 0mne vivum ex vivo-- no Life
without antecedent Life. In this mystical theory of the Origin of Life the
whole of the New Testament writers are agreed. And, as we have already seen,
Christ Himself founds Christianity upon Biogenesis stated in its most literal
form. "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the
Kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is
born of the Spirit is Spirit. Marvel not that I said unto you, ye must be born
again."[37] Why did He add Marvel not?
Did He seek to allay the fear in the bewildered ruler's mind that there was
more in this novel doctrine than a simple analogy from the first to the second
birth?
The attitude of the natural man, again, with
reference to the Spiritual, is a subject on which the New Testament is equally
pronounced. Not only in his relation to the spiritual man, but to the whole
Spiritual World, the natural man is regarded as dead. He is as a crystal
to an organism. The natural world is to the Spiritual as the inorganic to the
organic. "To be carnally minded is Death."[38] "Thou hast a name to live, but art Dead."[39] " She that liveth in pleasure is
Dead while she liveth."[40] "To
you hath He given Life which were Dead in trespasses and sins."[41]
It is clear that a remarkable harmony
exists here between the Organic World as arranged by Science and the Spiritual
World as arranged by Scripture. We find one great Law guarding the thresholds
of both worlds, securing that entrance from a lower sphere shall only take
place by a direct regenerating act, and that emanating from the world next in
order above. There are not two laws of Biogenesis, one for the natural, the
other for the Spiritual; one law is for both. Wherever there is Life, Life of
any kind, this same law holds. The analogy, therefore, is only among the
phenomena; between laws there is no analogy--there is Continuity. In either
case, the first step in peopling these worlds with the appropriate living forms
is virtually miracle. Nor in one case is there less of mystery in the act than
in the other. The second birth is scarcely less perplexing to the theologian
than the first to the embryologist.
A moment's reflection ought now to make it clear
why in the Spiritual World there had to be added to this mystery the further
mystery of its proclamation through the medium of Revelation. This is the point
at which the scientific man is apt to part company with the theologian. He
insists on having all things materialised before his eyes in Nature. If Nature
cannot discuss this with him, there is nothing to discuss. But Nature can
discuss this with him--only she cannot open the discussion or supply all the
material to begin with. If Science averred that she could do this, the
theologian this time must part company with such Science. For any Science which
makes such a demand is false to the doctrines of Biogenesis. What is this but
the demand that a lower world, hermetically sealed against all
communication with a world above it, should have a mature and intelligent
acquaintance with its phenomena and laws? Can the mineral discourse to me of
animal Life? Can it tell me what lies beyond the narrow boundary of its inert
being? Knowing nothing of other than the chemical and physical laws, what is
its criticism worth of the principles of Biology? And even when some visitor
from the upper world, for example some root from a living tree, penetrating its
dark recess, honours it with a touch, will it presume to define the form and
purpose of its patron, or until the bioplasm has done its gracious work can it
even know that it is being touched? The barrier which separates Kingdoms from
one another restricts mind not less than matter. Any information of the
Kingdoms above it that could come to the mineral world could only come by a
communication from above. An analogy from the lower world might make such
communication intelligible as well as credible, but the information in the
first instance must be vouchsafed as a revelation. Similarly if those in
the Organic Kingdom are to know anything of the Spiritual World, that knowledge
must at least begin as Revelation. Men who reject this source of information,
by the Law of Biogenesis, can have no other. It is no spell of ignorance
arbitrarily laid upon certain members of the Organic Kingdom that prevents them
reading the secrets of the Spiritual World. It is a scientific necessity. No
exposition of the case could be more truly scientific than this: "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."[42] The verb here, it
will be again observed, is potential. This is not a dogma of theology, but a
necessity of Science. And Science, for the most part, has consistently accepted
the situation. It has always proclaimed its ignorance of the Spiritual World.
When Mr. Herbert Spencer affirms, "Regarding Science as a gradually increasing
sphere we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into
wider contact with surrounding nescience,"[43]
from his standpoint he is quite correct. The endeavours of well-meaning persons
to show that the Agnostic's position, when he asserts his ignorance of the
Spiritual World, is only a pretence; the attempts to prove that he really knows
a great deal about it if he would only admit it, are quite misplaced. He really
does not know. The verdict that the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God, that they are foolishness unto him, that neither can he
know them, is final as a statement of scientific truth--a statement on
which the entire Agnostic literature is simply one long commentary.
We are now in a better position to follow out the
more practical bearings of Biogenesis. There is an immense region surrounding
Regeneration, a dark and perplexing region where men would be thankful for any
light. It may well be that Biogenesis in its many ramifications may yet reach
down to some of the deeper mysteries of the Spiritual Life. But meantime there
is much to define even on the surface. And for the present we shall content
ourselves by turning its light upon one or two points of current interest.
It must long ago have appeared how decisive is
the answer of Science to the practical question with which we set out as to the
possibility of a Spontaneous Development of Spiritual Life in the individual
soul. The inquiry into the Origin of Life is the fundamental question alike of
Biology and Christianity. We can afford to enlarge upon it, therefore, even at
the risk of repetition. When men are offering us a Christianity without a
living Spirit, and a personal religion without conversion, no emphasis
or reiteration can be extreme. Besides, the clearness as well as the
definiteness of the Testimony of Nature to any Spiritual truth is of immense
importance. Regeneration has not merely been an outstanding difficulty, but an
overwhelming obscurity. Even to earnest minds the difficulty of grasping the
truth at all has always proved extreme. Philosophically one scarcely sees
either the necessity or the possibility of being born again. Why a virtuous man
should not simply grow better and better until in his own right he enter the
Kingdom of God is what thousands honestly and seriously fail to understand. Now
Philosophy cannot help us here. Her arguments are, if anything, against us. But
Science answers to the appeal at once. If it be simply pointed out that this is
the same absurdity as to ask why a stone should not grow more and more living
till it enters the Organic World, the point is clear in an instant.
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 favourable 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."
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.
Shall we next inquire more precisely what is this
something extra which constitutes Spiritual Life? What is this strange and new
endowment in its nature and vital essence? And the answer is brief-- it is
Christ. He that hath the Son hath Life.
Are we forsaking the lines of Science in saying
so? Yes and No. Science has drawn for us the distinction. It has no voice as to
the nature of the distinction except this--that the new endowment is a
something different from anything else with which it deals. It is not ordinary
Vitality, it is not intellectual, it is not moral, but something beyond. And
Revelation steps in and names what it is--it is Christ. Out of the multitude of
sentences where this announcement is made, these few may be selected: "Know ye
not your own selves how that Jesus Christ is in you?"44 "Your
bodies are the members of Christ."[45] "At
that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you."[46] "We will come unto him and make our
abode with him."[47] "I am the Vine, ye are
the branches."[48] "I am crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me."[49]
Three things are clear from these statements:
First, They are not mere figures of rhetoric. They are explicit declarations.
If language means any. thing these words announce a literal fact In some of
Christ's own statements the literalism is if possible still more impressive.
For instance, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood,
ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath
eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat
indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My
blood dwelleth in Me and I in him."
In the second place, Spiritual Life is not
something outside ourselves. The idea is not that Christ is in heaven and that
we can stretch out some mysterious faculty and deal with Him there. This is the
vague form in which many conceive the truth, but it is contrary to Christ's
teaching and to the analogy of nature. Vegetable Life is not contained in a
reservoir somewhere in the skies, and measured out spasmodically at certain
seasons. The Life is in every plant and tree, inside its own substance
and tissue, and continues there until it dies. This localisation of Life in the
individual is precisely the point where Vitality differs from the other forces
of nature, such as magnetism and electricity. Vitality has much in common with
such forces as magnetism and electricity, but there is one inviolable
distinction between them--that Life is permanently fixed and rooted in the
organism. The doctrines of conservation and transformation of energy, that is
to say, do not hold for Vitality. The electrician can demagnetise a bar of
iron, that is, he can transform its energy of magnetism into something
else--heat, or motion, or light--and then re-form these back into magnetism.
For magnetism has no root, no individuality, no fixed indwelling. But the
biologist cannot devitalise a plant or an animal and revivify it again.[50] Life is not one of the homeless forces which
promiscuously inhabit space, or which can be gathered like electricity from the
clouds and dissipated back again into space. Life is definite and resident; and
Spiritual Life is not a visit from a force, but a resident tenant in the
soul.
This is, however, to formulate the statement of
the third point, that spiritual Life is not an ordinary form of energy or
force. The analogy from Nature endorses this, but here Nature stops. It cannot
say what Spiritual Life is. Indeed what natural Life is remains unknown, and
the word Life still wanders through Science without a definition. Nature is
silent, therefore, and must be as to Spiritual Life. But in the absence of
natural light we fall back upon that complementary revelation which always
shines when truth is necessary and where Nature fails. We ask with Paul when
this Life first visited him on the Damascus road, What is this? "Who art Thou
Lord? " And we hear, " I am Jesus."[51]
We must expect to find this denied. Besides a
proof from Revelation, this is an argument from experience. And yet we shall
still be told that this Spiritual Life is a force. But let it be remembered
what this means in Science, it means the heresy of confounding Force with
Vitality. We must also expect to be told that this Spiritual Life is simply a
development of ordinary Life--just as Dr. Bastian tells us that natural Life is
formed according to the same laws which determine the more simple chemical
combinations. But remember what this means in Science. It is the heresy of
Spontaneous Generation, a heresy so thoroughly discredited now that scarcely an
authority in Europe will lend his name to it. Who art Thou, Lord? Unless we are
to be allowed to hold Spontaneous Generation there is no alternative: Life can
only come from Life: "I am Jesus."
A hundred other questions now rush into the mind
about this Life: How does it come? Why does it come? How is it manifested? What
faculty does it employ? Where does it reside? Is it communicable? What are its
conditions? One or two of these questions may be vaguely answered, the rest
bring us face to face with mystery. Let it not be thought that the scientific
treatment of a Spiritual subject has reduced religion to a problem of physics,
or demonstrated God by the laws of biology. A religion without mystery is an
absurdity. Even Science has its mysteries, none more inscrutable than around
this Science of Life. It taught us sooner or later to expect mystery, and now
we enter its domain. Let It be carefully marked, however, that the cloud does
not fall and cover us till we have ascertained the most momentous truth of
Religion--that Christ is in the Christian.
Not that there is anything new in this. The
Churches have always held that Christ was the source of Life. No spiritual man
ever claims that his spirituality is his own. "I live," he will tell you;
"nevertheless it is not I, but Christ liveth in me." Christ our Life has indeed
been the only doctrine in the Christian Church from Paul to Augustine, from
Calvin to Newman. Yet, when the Spiritual man is cross-examined upon this
confession it is astonishing to find what uncertain hold it has upon his mind.
Doctrinally he states it adequately and holds it unhesitatingly. But when
pressed with the literal question he shrinks from the answer. We do not really
believe that the Living Christ has touched us, that He makes His abode in us.
Spiritual Life is not as real to us as natural Life. And we cover our retreat
into unbelieving vagueness with a plea of reverence, justified, as we think, by
the "Thus far and no farther" of ancient Scriptures. There is often a great
deal of intellectual sin concealed under this old aphorism. When men do not
really wish to go farther they find it an honourable convenience sometimes to
sit down on the outermost edge of the Holy Ground on the pretext of taking off
their shoes. Yet we must be certain that, making a virtue of reverence, we are
not merely excusing ignorance; or, under the plea of mystery, evading a truth
which has been stated in the New Testament a hundred times, in the most literal
form, and with all but monotonous repetition. The greatest truths are always
the most loosely held. And not the least of the advantages of taking up this
question from the present standpoint is that we may see how a confused doctrine
can really bear the luminous definition of Science and force itself upon us
with all the weight of Natural Law.
What is mystery to many men, what feeds their
worship, and at the same time spoils it, is that area round all great truth
which is really capable of illumination, and into which every earnest mind
permitted and commanded to go with a light. We cry mystery long before the
region of mystery comes. True mystery casts no shadows around. It is a sudden
and awful gulf yawning across the field of knowledge; its form is irregular,
but its lips are clean cut and sharp, and the mind can go to the very verge and
look down the precipice into the dim abyss,
"Where writhing
clouds unroll,
Striving to utter themselves in
shapes."
We have gone with a light to the
very verge of this truth. We have seen that the Spiritual Life is an endowment
from the Spiritual World, and that the Living Spirit of Christ dwells in the
Christian. But now the gulf yawns black before us. What more does Science know
of Life? Nothing. It knows nothing further about its origin in detail. It knows
nothing about its ultimate nature. It cannot even define it. There is a
helplessness in scientific books here, and a continual confession of it
which to thoughtful minds is almost touching. Science, therefore, has not
eliminated the true mysteries from our faith, but only the false. And it has
done more. It has made true mystery scientific. Religion in having mystery is
in analogy with all around it. Where there is exceptional mystery in the
Spiritual world it will generally be found that there is a corresponding
mystery in the natural world. And, as Origen centuries ago insisted, the
difficulties of Religion are simply the difficulties of Nature.
One question more we may look at for a moment.
What can be gathered on the surface as to the process of Regeneration in the
individual soul? From the analogies of Biology 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. For the kingdom of God cometh without observation.
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.
[33] "Beginnings of Life." By H. C. Bastian,
M.A., M.D. F.R.S. Macmillan, vol. ii. p. 633.
[34] "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley
F.R.S., p. 239.
[35] Nineteenth Century, 1878, p.
507.
[36] This being the crucial point it may not
be inappropriate to supplement the quotations already given in the text with
the following:--
"We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf--the gulf of all
gulfs--that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any
other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men
first looked into it--the mighty gulf between death and life."--"As Regards
Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., p. 42.
"The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living
and the not-living."--Huxley, "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (new Ed.). Art.
"Biology."
"Whoever recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made very
recently to discover a decided support for the generatio aquivoca in the
lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world, will feel it
doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in
any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life."--Virchow: "The Freedom
of Science in the Modern State."
"All really scientific experience tells us that life can be produced from a
living antecedent only."--"The Unseen Universe." 6th Ed. p. 229.
[37] John iii.
[38] Rom. viii. 6.
[39] Rev. iii. 1.
[40] 1 Tim. v. 6.
[41] Eph. ii. 1,5.
[42] 1 Cor. ii. 14.
[43] "First Principles," 2nd Ed., p. 17.
44 2 Cor. xiii. 5.
[45] 1 Cor. vi. 15.
[46] John xiv. 20.
[47] John xiv. 21-23.
[48] John xv. 5.
[49] Gal. ii. 20.
[50] One must not bc misled by popular
statements in this connection, such as this of Professor Owen's: "There are
orgamsms which we can devitalise and revitalise--devive and revive--many
times." (Monthly Microscopical Journal, May, 1869, p. 294.) The
reference is of course to the extraordinary capacity for resuscitation
possessed by many of the Protozoa and other low forms of life.
[51] Acts ix. 5.