From time immemorial the researches of men in the vain effort to
discover and make known to the world the origin of life, of all life,
on the planet earth and elsewhere, have been most anxiously considered.
These efforts of the inquiring minds of men have not been altogether
fruitless of results; because through them has been made manifest the
most marvelous of all the facts in nature, that "there is no death,"
that "what seems so is transition." It has also become known and
understood of late years, that from the ephemera of life, of an hour or
of a day up to the highest archangel, through all the intermediate
grades of being, visible and invisible, there are no vacant spaces.
Everywhere there is an overwhelming volume of life, actual though not
conscious or individualized, until the higher ranges of human life
become known and correlated. Comes the man with the scalpel. He
dissects the human brain, and is disgusted at finding no clew to the
secret cause and source of life. He never suspects, he does not
conceive of the fact that there is in everyone, an immutable, invisible
power--a spirit germ--nor would he believe in its potency if he knew it
were true. Then there is the man with the retorts and the scales, and
the "residues." He announces to the world that he can create life
without any help from the "Great Spirit" people talk so much about.
There is also the man with the bottle full of water, with a handful of
mud at the bottom. He is sure he can produce living organisms; might
even set agoing a new race of beings, if he only had time, and a larger
bottle! Back of every expression of life we know abides the source,
the cause of all existence, so hid, so truly an integral part of life
as never to yield a knowledge of itself either to the scalpel of the
physicians or to the electrical battery of the explorer of mysteries.
Into this sphere can no man come. Herein can be no meddling of the
human intellect.
Through this searching for the source, the cause of life, man has been
brought face to face with law, with a force he can never understand or
conquer, or adjust to the demands or suggestions of his will. From
ancient expressions of intelligence have been handed down to us the
name, the title, God, as a concrete expression of this power that holds
dominance over all created beings.
Another important revelation made to man is the fact that there is but
one law, _per se_.
It is an established, consecutive, endless chain from the beginnings of
human life here up to the absolute ultimate of the immortal soul. It
proves the homogeneity of the whole human race; it declares the value
of existence here, and explains the logical sequence of its continuance
beyond this fragment of life into nature's invisible realms.
What we shall do, each one of us, with our individual portion of life;
how we shall work out our personal experiences, and to what end is
another matter. There is our heredity which is, in every case, so
mixed as to yield but little of the primal strain, and which gives to
each one of us unknown possibilities, or undesired idiosyncracies to
fight out and eradicate from the nature. The many failures to discover
the mystery of life surely ought to prove to all experimenters the
truth that spirit holds the only key to its endless mystery.