What the philosopher has to throw into the other scale can be easily

indicated. Generally speaking, he demurs to the dogmatism of the

conclusion. That mind and brain react, that the mental and the

physiological processes are related, and very intimately related, is

beyond controversy. But how they are related, he submits, is still

altogether unknown. The correlation of mind and brain do not involve

their identity. And not a few authorities accordingly have consistently

hesitated to draw any conclusion at all. Even Buechner's statement turns

out, on close examination, to be tentative in the extreme. In prefacing

his chapter on Personal Continuance, after a single sentence on the

dependence of the soul and its manifestations upon a material

substratum, he remarks, "Though we are unable to form a definite idea as

to the _how_ of this connection, we are still by these facts justified

in asserting, that the mode of this connection renders it _apparently_

impossible that they should continue to exist separately."[74] There is,

therefore, a flaw at this point in the argument for materialism. It may

not help the spiritualist in the least degree positively. He may be as

far as ever from a theory of how consciousness could continue without

the material tissue. But his contention secures for him the right of

speculation. The path beyond may lie in hopeless gloom; but it is not

barred. He may bring forward his theory if he will. And this is

something. For a permission to go on is often the most that Science can

grant to Religion.

Men have taken advantage of this loophole in various ways. And though

it cannot be said that these speculations offer us more than a

probability, this is still enough to combine with the deep-seated

expectation in the bosom of mankind and give fresh luster to the hope of

a future life. Whether we find relief in the theory of a simple dualism;

whether with Ulrici we further define the soul as an invisible

enswathement of the body, material yet non-atomic; whether, with the

"Unseen Universe," we are helped by the spectacle of known forms of

matter shading off into an ever-growing subtilty, mobility, and

immateriality; or whether, with Wundt, we regard the soul as "the

ordered unity of many elements," it is certain that shapes can be given

to the conception of a correspondence which shall bridge the grave such

as to satisfy minds too much accustomed to weigh evidence to put

themselves off with fancies.

But whether the possibilities of physiology or the theories of

philosophy do or do not substantially assist us in realizing

Immortality, is to Religion, to Religion at least regarded from the

present point of view, of inferior moment. The fact of Immortality rests

for us on a different basis. Probably, indeed, after all the Christian

philosopher never engaged himself in a more superfluous task than in

seeking along physiological lines to find room for a soul. The theory of

Christianity has only to be fairly stated to make manifest its thorough

independence of all the usual speculations on Immortality. The theory is

not that thought, volition, or emotion, as such are to survive the

grave. The difficulty of holding a doctrine in this form, in spite of

what has been advanced to the contrary, in spite of the hopes and wishes

of mankind, in spite of all the scientific and philosophical attempts to

make it tenable, is still profound. No secular theory of personal

continuance, as even Butler acknowledged, does not equally demand the

eternity of the brute. No secular theory defines the point in the chain

of Evolution at which organisms became endowed with Immortality. No

secular theory explains the condition of the endowment, nor indicates

its goal. And if we have nothing more to fan hope than the unexplored

mystery of the whole region, or the unknown remainders among the

potencies of Life, then, as those who have "hope only in this world," we

are "of all men the most miserable."

When we turn, on the other hand, to the doctrine as it came from the

lips of Christ, we find ourselves in an entirely different region. He

makes no attempt to project the material into the immaterial. The old

elements, however refined and subtle as to their matter, are not in

themselves to inherit the Kingdom of God. That which is flesh is flesh.

Instead of attaching Immortality to the natural organism, He introduces

a new and original factor which none of the secular, and few even of the

theological theories, seem to take sufficiently into account. To

Christianity, "he that hath the Son of God hath Life, and he that hath

not the Son hath not Life." This, as we take it, defines the

correspondence which is to bridge the grave. This is the clue to the

nature of the Life that lies at the back of the spiritual organism. And

this is the true solution of the mystery of Eternal Life.

There lies a something at the back of the correspondences of the

spiritual organism--just as there lies a something at the back of the

natural correspondences. To say that Life is a correspondence is only to

express the partial truth. There is something behind. Life manifests

itself in correspondences. But what determines them? The organism

exhibits a variety of correspondences. What organizes them? As in the

natural, so in the spiritual, there is a Principle of Life. We cannot

get rid of that term. However clumsy, however provisional, however much

a mere cloak for ignorance, Science as yet is unable to dispense with

the idea of a Principle of Life. We must work with the word till we get

a better. Now that which determines the correspondence of the spiritual

organism is a Principle of Spiritual Life. It is a new and Divine

Possession. He that hath the Son hath Life; conversely, he that hath

Life hath the Son. And this indicates at once the quality and the

quantity of the correspondence which is to bridge the grave. He that

hath Life hath _the Son_. He possesses the Spirit of a Son. That spirit

is, so to speak, organized within him by the Son. It is the

manifestation of the new nature--of which more anon. The fact to note at

present is that this is not an organic correspondence, but a spiritual

correspondence. It comes not from generation, but from regeneration. The

relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is, in

theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the filial

correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal. This is

not only the real relation, but the only possible relation: "Neither

knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son

will reveal Him." And this on purely natural grounds. It takes the

Divine to know the Divine--but in no more mysterious sense than it takes

the human to understand the human. The analogy, indeed, for the whole

field here has been finely expressed already by Paul: "What man," he

asks, "knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in

him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which

is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of

God."[75]

It were idle, such being the quality of the new relation, to add that

this also contains the guarantee of its eternity. Here at last is a

correspondence which will never cease. Its powers in bridging the grave

have been tried. The correspondence of the spiritual man possesses the

supernatural virtues of the Resurrection and the Life. It is known by

former experiment to have survived the "changes in the physical state of

the environment," and those "mechanical actions" and "variations of

available food," which Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us are "liable to stop

the processes going on in the organism." In short, this is a

correspondence which at once satisfies the demands of Science and

Religion. In mere quantity it is different from every other

correspondence known. Setting aside everything else in Religion,

everything adventitious, local, and provisional; dissecting in to the

bone and marrow we find this--a correspondence which can never break

with an Environment which can never change. Here is a relation

established with Eternity. The passing years lay no limiting hand on it.

Corruption injures it not. It survives Death. It, and it only, will

stretch beyond the grave and be found inviolate--

"When the moon is old,

And the stars are cold,

And the books of the Judgment-day unfold."

The misgiving which will creep sometimes over the brightest faith has

already received its expression and its rebuke: "Who shall separate us

from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution,

or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" Shall these "changes in

the physical state of the environment" which threaten death to the

natural man destroy the spiritual? Shall death, or life, or angels, or

principalities, or powers, arrest or tamper with his eternal

correspondences? "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors

through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor

life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,

nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall

be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus

our Lord."[76]

It may seem an objection to some that the "perfect correspondence"

should come to man in so extraordinary a way. The earlier stages in the

doctrine are promising enough; they are entirely in line with Nature.

And if Nature had also furnished the "perfect correspondence" demanded

for an Eternal Life the position might be unassailable. But this sudden

reference to a something outside the natural Environment destroys the

continuity, and discovers a permanent weakness in the whole theory?

To which there is a twofold reply. In the first place, to go outside

what we call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the

natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another

large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it,

is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral

world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed

either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that

from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was _supernatural_.

Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where one stands.

Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man. When

a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated to the organic

kingdom, no trespass against Nature is committed. It merely enters a

larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it, but which now

is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is seized upon by

the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done to natural

law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing into the

organic.

But in the second place, it is complained as if it were an enormity in

itself that the spiritual correspondence should be furnished from the

spiritual world. And to this the answer lies in the same direction.

Correspondence in any case is the gift of Environment. The natural

Environment gives men their natural faculties; the spiritual affords

them their spiritual faculties. It is natural for the spiritual

Environment to supply the spiritual faculties; it would be quite

unnatural for the natural Environment to do it. The natural law of

Biogenesis forbids it; the moral fact that the finite cannot comprehend

the Infinite is against it; the spiritual principle that flesh and

blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God renders it absurd. Not, however,

that the spiritual faculties are, as it were, manufactured in the

spiritual world and supplied ready-made to the spiritual

organism--forced upon it as an external equipment. This certainly is not

involved in saying that the spiritual faculties are furnished by the

spiritual world. Organisms are not added to by accretion, as in the case

of minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in

the spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are

organized in the protoplasm of the body. The plant is made of materials

which have once been inorganic. An organizing principle not belonging to

their kingdom lays hold of them and elaborates them until they have

correspondences with the kingdom to which the organizing principle

belonged. Their original organizing principle, if it can be called by

this name, was Crystallization; so that we have now a distinctly foreign

power organizing in totally new and higher directions. In the spiritual

world, similarly, we find an organizing principle at work among the

materials of the organic kingdom, performing a further miracle, but not

a different kind of miracle, producing organizations of a novel kind,

but not by a novel method. The second process, in fact, is simply what

an enlightened evolutionist would have expected from the first. It marks

the natural and legitimate progress of the development. And this in the

line of the true Evolution--not the _linear_ Evolution, which would look

for the development of the natural man through powers already inherent,

as if one were to look to Crystallization to accomplish the development

of the mineral into the plant--but that larger form of Evolution which

includes among its factors the double Law of Biogenesis and the immense

further truth that this involves.

What is further included in this complex correspondence we shall have

opportunity to illustrate afterward.[77] Meantime let it be noted on

what the Christian argument for Immortality really rests. It stands upon

the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical

Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that

Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said,

"that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly."

And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is

clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a

metaphorical meaning on the commonest word of the New Testament is to

violate every canon of interpretation, and at the same time to charge

the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an

unusual use of so exact a vehicle for expressing definite thought as the

Greek language, and that on the most momentous subject of which He ever

spoke to men. It is a canon of interpretation, according to Alford, that

"a figurative sense of words is never admissible except when required by

the context." The context, in most cases, is not only directly

unfavorable to a figurative meaning, but in innumerable instances in

Christ's teaching Life is broadly contrasted with Death. In the teaching

of the apostles, again, we find that, without exception, they accepted

the term in its simple literal sense. Reuss defines the apostolic belief

with his usual impartiality when--and the quotation is doubly pertinent

here--he discovers in the apostle's conception of Life, first, "the idea

of a real existence, an existence such as is proper to God and to the

Word; an imperishable existence--that is to say, not subject to the

vicissitudes and imperfections of the finite world. This primary idea is

repeatedly expressed, at least in a negative form; it leads to a

doctrine of immortality, or, to speak more correctly, of life, far

surpassing any that had been expressed in the formulas of the current

philosophy or theology, and resting upon premises and conceptions

altogether different. In fact, it can dispense both with the

philosophical thesis of the immateriality or indestructibility of the

human soul, and with the theological thesis of a miraculous corporeal

reconstruction of our person; theses, the first of which is altogether

foreign to the religion of the Bible, and the second absolutely opposed

to reason." Second, "the idea of life, as it is conceived in this

system, implies the idea of a power, an operation, a communication,

since this life no longer remains, so to speak, latent or passive in God

and in the Word, but through them reaches the believer. It is not a

mental somnolent thing; it is not a plant without fruit; it is a germ

which is to find fullest development."[78]

If we are asked to define more clearly what is meant by this mysterious

endowment of Life, we again hand over the difficulty to Science. When

Science can define the Natural Life and the Physical Force we may hope

for further clearness on the nature and action of the Spiritual Powers.

The effort to detect the living Spirit must be at least as idle as the

attempt to subject protoplasm to microscopic examination in the hope of

discovering Life. We are warned, also, not to expect too much. "Thou

canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." This being its

quality, when the Spiritual Life is discovered in the laboratory it will

possibly be time to give it up altogether. It may say, as Socrates of

his soul, "You may bury me--if you can catch me."

Science never corroborates a spiritual truth without illuminating it.

The threshold of Eternity is a place where many shadows meet. And the

light of Science here, where everything is so dark, is welcome a

thousand times. Many men would be religious if they knew where to begin;

many would be more religious if they were sure where it would end. It is

not indifference that keeps some men from God, but ignorance. "Good

Master, what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" is still the deepest

question of the age. What is Religion? What am I to believe? What seek

with all my heart and soul and mind?--this is the imperious question

sent up to consciousness from the depths of being in all earnest hours;

sent down again, alas, with many of us, time after time, unanswered.

Into all our thought and work and reading this question pursues us. But

the theories are rejected one by one; the great books are returned sadly

to their shelves, the years pass, and the problem remains unsolved. The

confusion of tongues here is terrible. Every day a new authority

announces himself. Poets, philosophers, preachers try their hand on us

in turn. New prophets arise, and beseech us for our soul's sake to give

ear to them--at last in an hour of inspiration they have discovered the

final truth. Yet the doctrine of yesterday is challenged by a fresh

philosophy to-day: and the creed of to-day will fall in turn before the

criticism of to-morrow. Increase of knowledge increaseth sorrow. And at

length the conflicting truths, like the beams of light in the laboratory

experiment, combine in the mind to make total darkness.

But here are two outstanding authorities agreed--not men, not

philosophers, not creeds. Here is the voice of God and the voice of

Nature. I cannot be wrong if I listen to them. Sometimes when uncertain

of a voice from its very loudness, we catch the missing syllable in the

echo. In God and Nature we have Voice and Echo. When I hear both, I am

assured. My sense of hearing does not betray me twice. I recognize the

Voice in the Echo, the Echo makes me certain of the Voice; I listen and

I know. The question of a Future Life is a biological question. Nature

may be silent on other problems of Religion; but here she has a right to

speak. The whole confusion around the doctrine of Eternal Life has

arisen from making it a question of Philosophy. We shall do ill to

refuse a hearing to any speculation of Philosophy; the ethical relations

here especially are intimate and real. But in the first instance

Eternal Life, as a question of _Life_, is a problem for Biology. The

soul is a living organism. And for any question as to the soul's Life we

must appeal to Life-science. And what does the Life-science teach? That

if I am to inherit Eternal Life, I must cultivate a correspondence with

the Eternal. This is a simple proposition, for Nature is always simple.

I take this proposition, and, leaving Nature, proceed to fill it in. I

search everywhere for a clue to the Eternal. I ransack literature for a

definition of a correspondence between man and God. Obviously that can

only come from one source. And the analogies of Science permits us to

apply to it. All knowledge lies in Environment. When I want to know

about minerals I go to minerals. When I want to know about flowers I go

to flowers. And they tell me. In their own way they speak to me, each in

its own way, and each for itself--not the mineral for the flower, which

is impossible, nor the flower for the mineral, which is also impossible.

So if I want to know about Man, I go to his part of the Environment. And

he tells me about himself, not as the plant or the mineral, for he is

neither, but in his own way. And if I want to know about God, I go to

His part of the Environment. And He tells me about Himself, not as a

Man, for He is not Man, but in His own way. And just as naturally as the

flower and the mineral and the Man, each in their own way, tell me about

themselves, He tells me about Himself. He very strangely condescends

indeed in making things plain to me, actually assuming for a time the

Form of a Man that I at my poor level may better see Him. This is my

opportunity to know Him. This incarnation is God making Himself

accessible to human thought--God opening to man the possibility of

correspondence through Jesus Christ. And this correspondence and this

Environment are those I seek. He Himself assures me, "This is Life

Eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ

whom Thou hast sent."

Do I not now discern the deeper meaning in "_Jesus Christ whom Thou hast

sent_?" Do I not better understand with what vision and rapture the

profoundest of the disciples exclaims, "The Son of God is come, and hath

given us an understanding that we might know Him that is True?"[79]

Having opened correspondence with the Eternal Environment, the

subsequent stages are in the line of all other normal development. We

have but to continue, to deepen, to extend, and to enrich the

correspondence that has been begun. And we shall soon find to our

surprise that this is accompanied by another and parallel process. The

action is not all upon our side. The Environment also will be found to

correspond. The influence of Environment is one of the greatest and most

substantial of modern biological doctrines. Of the power of Environment

to form or transform organisms, of its ability to develop or suppress

function, of its potency in determining growth, and generally of its

immense influence in Evolution, there is no need now to speak. But

Environment is now acknowledged to be one of the most potent factors in

the Evolution of Life. The influence of Environment too seems to

increase rather than diminish as we approach the higher forms of being.

The highest forms are the most mobile; their capacity of change is the

greatest; they are, in short, most easily acted on by Environment. And

not only are the highest organisms the most mobile, but the highest part

of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower. Environment can

do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the

body of a child: but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive

is its soul! How infallibly can it be turned to music or to dissonance

by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively

indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made or unmade, by external

circumstance! Might we not all confess with Ulysses--

"I am a part of all that I have met."

Much more, then, shall we look for the influence of Environment on the

spiritual nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching

out his eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him,

shall he not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he

not become holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall

he miss becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail

to be taught of God?

Growth in grace is sometimes described as a strange, mystical, and

unintelligible process. It is mystical, but neither strange nor

unintelligible. It proceeds according to Natural Law, and the leading

factor in sanctification is Influence of Environment. The possibility of

it depends upon the mobility of the organism; the result, on the extent

and frequency of certain correspondences. These facts insensibly lead on

to a further suggestion. Is it not possible that these biological truths

may carry with them the clue to still profounder philosophy--even that

of Regeneration?

Evolutionists tell us that by the influence of environment certain

aquatic animals have become adapted to a terrestrial mode of life.

Breathing normally by gills, as the result and reward of a continued

effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of

heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young

organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists--as in the

tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches the true lung

appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It

then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the

adult is conducted by lungs alone.[80] We may be far, in the meantime,

from saying that this is proved. It is for those who accept it to deny

the justice of the spiritual analogy. Is religion to them unscientific

in its doctrine of Regeneration? Will the evolutionist who admits the

regeneration of the frog under the modifying influence of a continued

correspondence with a new environment, care to question the possibility

of the soul acquiring such a faculty as that of Prayer, the marvelous

breathing-function of the new creature, when in contact with the

atmosphere of a besetting God? Is the change from the earthly to the

heavenly more mysterious than the change from the aquatic to the

terrestrial mode of life? Is Evolution to stop with the organic? If it

be objected that it has taken ages to perfect the function in the

batrachian, the reply is, that it will take ages to perfect the function

in the Christian. For every thousand years the natural evolution will

allow for the development of its organism, the Higher Biology will grant

its product millions. We have indeed spoken of the spiritual

correspondence as already perfect--but it is perfect only as the bud is

perfect. "It doth not yet appear what it shall be," any more than it

appeared a million years ago what the evolving batrachian would be.

But to return. We have been dealing with the scientific aspects of

communion with God. Insensibly, from quantity we have been led to speak

of quality. And enough has now been advanced to indicate generally the

nature of that correspondence with which is necessarily associated

Eternal Life. There remain but one or two details to which we must

lastly, and very briefly, address ourselves.

The quality of everlastingness belongs, as we have seen, to a single

correspondence, or rather to a single set of correspondences. But it is

apparent that before this correspondence can take full and final effect

a further process is necessary. By some means it must be separated from

all the other correspondences of the organism which do not share its

peculiar quality. In this life it is restrained by these other

correspondences. They may contribute to it, or hinder it; but they are

essentially of a different order. They belong not to Eternity but to

Time, and to this present world; and, unless some provision is made for

dealing with them, they will detain the aspiring organism in this

present world till Time is ended. Of course, in a sense, all that

belongs to Time belongs also to Eternity; but these lower

correspondences are in their nature unfitted for an Eternal Life. Even

if they were perfect in their relation to their Environment, they would

still not be Eternal. However opposed, apparently, to the scientific

definition of Eternal Life, it is yet true that perfect correspondence

with Environment is not Eternal Life. A very important word in the

complete definition is, in this sentence, omitted. On that word it has

not been necessary hitherto, and for obvious reasons, to place any

emphasis, but when we come to deal with false pretenders to Immortality

we must return to it. Were the definition complete as it stands, it

might, with the permission of the psycho-physiologist, guarantee the

Immortality of every living thing. In the dog, for instance, the

material framework giving way at death might leave the released canine

spirit still free to inhabit the old Environment. And so with every

creature which had ever established a conscious relation with

surrounding things. Now the difficulty in framing a theory of Eternal

Life has been to construct one which will exclude the brute creation,

drawing the line rigidly at man, or at least, somewhere within the human

race. Not that we need object to the Immortality of the dog, or of the

whole inferior creation. Nor that we need refuse a place to any

intelligible speculation which would people the earth to-day with the

invisible forms of all things that have ever lived. Only we still insist

that this is not Eternal Life. And why? Because their Environment is not

Eternal. Their correspondence, however firmly established, is

established with that which shall pass away. An Eternal Life demands an

Eternal Environment.

The demand for a perfect Environment as well as for a perfect

correspondence is less clear in Mr. Herbert Spencer's definition than it

might be. But it is an essential factor. An organism might remain true

to its Environment, but what if the Environment played it false? If the

organism possessed the power to change, it could adapt itself to

successive changes in the Environment. And if this were guaranteed we

should also have the conditions for Eternal Life fulfilled. But what if

the Environment passed away altogether? What if the earth swept suddenly

into the sun? This is a change of Environment against which there could

be no precaution and for which there could be as little provision. With

a changing Environment even, there must always remain the dread and

possibility of a falling out of correspondence. At the best, Life would

be uncertain. But with a changeless Environment--such as that possessed

by the spiritual organism--the perpetuity of the correspondence, so far

as the external relation is concerned, is guaranteed. This quality of

permanence in the Environment distinguishes the religious relation from

every other. Why should not the musician's life be an Eternal Life?

Because, for one thing, the musical world, the Environment with which he

corresponds, is not eternal. Even if his correspondence in itself could

last, eternally, the environing material things with which he

corresponds must pass away. His soul might last forever--but not his

violin. So the man of the world might last forever--but not the world.

His Environment is not eternal; nor are even his correspondences--the

world passeth away _and the lust thereof_.

We find then that man, or the spiritual man, is equipped with two sets

of correspondences. One set possesses the quality of everlastingness,

the other is temporal. But unless these are separated by some means the

temporal will continue to impair and hinder the eternal. The final

preparation, therefore, for the inheriting of Eternal Life must consist

in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. These must be unloosed

and dissociated from the higher elements. And this is effected by a

closing catastrophe--Death.

Death ensues because certain relations in the organism are not adjusted

to certain relations in the Environment. There will come a time in each

history when the imperfect correspondences of the organism will betray

themselves by a failure to compass some necessary adjustment. This is

why Death is associated with Imperfection. Death is the necessary result

of Imperfection, and the necessary end of it. Imperfect correspondence

gives imperfect and uncertain Life. "Perfect correspondence," on the

other hand, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, would be "perfect Life."

To abolish Death, therefore, all that would be necessary would be to

abolish Imperfection. But it is the claim of Christianity that it can

abolish Death. And it is significant to notice that it does so by

meeting this very demand of Science--it abolishes Imperfection.

The part of the organism which begins to get out of correspondence with

the Organic Environment is the only part which is in vital

correspondence with it. Though a fatal disadvantage to the natural man

to be thrown out of correspondence with this Environment, it is of

inestimable importance to the spiritual man. For so long as it is

maintained the way is barred for a further Evolution. And hence the

condition necessary for the further Evolution is that the spiritual be

released from the natural. That is to say, the condition of the further

Evolution is Death. _Mors janua Vitae_, therefore, becomes a scientific

formula. Death, being the final shifting of all the correspondences, is

the indispensable factor of the higher Life. In the language of Science,

not less than of Scripture, "To die is gain."

The shifting of the correspondences is done by Nature. This is its last

and greatest contribution to mankind. Over the mouth of the grave the

perfect and the imperfect submit to their final separation. Each goes to

its own--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Spirit to Spirit.

"The dust shall return to the earth as it was; and the Spirit shall

return unto God who gave it."

FOOTNOTES:

[68] "Principles of Biology," p. 82.

[69] "Principles of Biology," p. 88.

[70] John xvii.

[71] _Vide_ Sir John Lubbock's "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," pp. 1-181.

[72] Buechner: "Force and Matter," 3d Ed., p. 232.

[73] "The Creed of Science," p. 169.

[74] "Force and Matter," p. 231.

[75] 1 Cor. ii. 11, 12.

[76] Rom. viii. 35-39.

[77] _Vide_ "Conformity to Type," page 287.

[78] "History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age," vol. ii. p.

496.

[79] 1 John v. 20.

[80] _Vide_ also the remarkable experiments of Fraeulein v. Chauvin on

the Transformation of the Mexican Axolotl into Amblystoma.--Weismann's

"Studies in the Theory of Descent," vol. ii. pt. iii.

ENVIRONMENT.

"When I talked with an ardent missionary and pointed out to him that

his creed found no support in my experience, he replied: 'It is not

so in your experience, but is so in the other world.' I answered:

'Other world! There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent;

here or nowhere is the whole fact.'"--_Emerson._

"Ye are complete in Him."--_Paul._

"Whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the

correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from

without."--_Herbert Spencer._

Students of Biography will observe that in all well-written Lives

attention is concentrated for the first few chapters upon two points. We

are first introduced to the family to which the subject of memoir

belonged. The grandparents, or even the more remote ancestors, are

briefly sketched and their chief characteristics brought prominently

into view. Then the parents themselves are photographed in detail. Their

appearance and physique, their character, their disposition, their

mental qualities, are set before us in a critical analysis. And finally

we are asked to observe how much the father and the mother respectively

have transmitted of their peculiar nature to their offspring. How

faithfully the ancestral lines have met in the latest product, how

mysteriously the joint characteristics of body and mind have blended,

and how unexpected yet how entirely natural a recombination is the

result--these points are elaborated with cumulative effect until we

realize at last how little we are dealing with an independent unit, how

much with a survival and reorganization of what seemed buried in the

grave.

In the second place, we are invited to consider more external

influences--schools and schoolmasters, neighbors, home, pecuniary

circumstances, scenery, and, by-and-by, the religious and political

atmosphere of the time. These also we are assured have played their part

in making the individual what he is. We can estimate these early

influences in any particular case with but small imagination if we fail

to see how powerfully they also have moulded mind and character, and in

what subtle ways they have determined the course of the future life.

This twofold relation of the individual, first, to his parents, and

second, to his circumstances, is not peculiar to human beings. These two

factors are responsible for making all living organisms what they are.

When a naturalist attempts to unfold the life-history of any animal, he

proceeds precisely on these same lines. Biography is really a branch of

Natural History; and the biographer who discusses his hero as the

resultant of these two tendencies, follows the scientific method as

rigidly as Mr. Darwin in studying "Animals and Plants under

Domestication."

Mr. Darwin, following Weismann, long ago pointed out that there are two

main factors in all Evolution--the nature of the organism and the nature

of the conditions. We have chosen our illustration from the highest or

human species in order to define the meaning of these factors in the

clearest way; but it must be remembered that the development of man

under these directive influences is essentially the same as that of any

other organism in the hands of Nature. We are dealing therefore with

universal Law. It will still further serve to complete the conception of

the general principle if we now substitute for the casual phrases by

which the factors have been described the more accurate terminology of

Science. Thus what Biography describes as parental influences, Biology

would speak of as Heredity; and all that is involved in the second

factor--the action of external circumstances and surroundings--the

naturalist would include under the single term Environment. These two,

Heredity and Environment, are the master-influences of the organic

world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are still

ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly understands

these influences; he who has decided how much to allow to each; he who

can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the old, so

directing them as at one moment to make them cooeperate, at another to

counteract one another, understands the rationale of personal

development. To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more

perfect adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some

inward evil with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to

make our Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are

the secrets of a well-ordered and successful life.

In the spiritual world, also, the subtle influences which form and

transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially

where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so

ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the

atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural

life. Few things are less understood than the conditions of the

spiritual life. The distressing incompetence of which most of us are

conscious in trying to work out our spiritual experience is due perhaps

less to the diseased will which we commonly blame for it than to

imperfect knowledge of the right conditions. It does not occur to us how

natural the spiritual is. We still strive for some strange transcendent

thing; we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as they prove

unsuccessful; and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole region

prevents us seeing fully--what we already half-suspect--how completely

we are missing the road. Living in the spiritual world, nevertheless, is

just as simple as living in the natural world; and it is the same kind

of simplicity. It is the same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind

of world--there are not two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in

the one are the conditions of life in the other. And till these

conditions are sensibly grasped, as the conditions of all life, it is

impossible that the personal effort after the highest life should be

other than a blind struggle carried on in fruitless sorrow and

humiliation.

Of these two universal factors, Heredity and Environment, it is

unnecessary to balance the relative importance here. The main influence,

unquestionably, must be assigned to the former. In practice, however,

and for an obvious reason, we are chiefly concerned with the latter.

What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves. No man

can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can choose his

own Environment. His relation to it, however largely determined by

Heredity in the first instance, is always open to alteration. And so

great is his control over Environment and so radical its influence over

him, that he can so direct it as either to undo, modify, perpetuate or

intensify the earlier hereditary influence within certain limits. But

the aspects of Environment which we have now to consider do not involve

us in questions of such complexity. In what high and mystical sense,

also, Heredity applies to the spiritual organism we need not just now

inquire. In the simpler relations of the more external factor we shall

find a large and fruitful field for study.

The influence of Environment may be investigated in two main aspects.

First, one might discuss the modern and very interesting question as to

the power of Environment to induce what is known to recent science as

Variation. A change in the surroundings of any animal, it is now

well-known, can so react upon it as to cause it to change. By the

attempt, conscious or unconscious, to adjust itself to the new

conditions, a true physiological change is gradually wrought within the

organism. Hunter, for example, in a classical experiment, so changed the

Environment of a sea-gull by keeping it in captivity that it could only

secure a grain diet. The effect was to modify the stomach of the bird,

normally adapted to a fish diet, until in time it came to resemble in

structure the gizzard of an ordinary grain-feeder such as the pigeon.

Holmgren again reversed this experiment by feeding pigeons for a

lengthened period on a meat-diet, with the result that the gizzard

became transformed into the carnivorous stomach. Mr. Alfred Russel

Wallace mentions the case of a Brazilian parrot which changes its color

from green to red or yellow when fed on the fat of certain fishes. Not

only changes of food, however, but changes of climate and of

temperature, changes in surrounding organisms, in the case of marine

animals even changes of pressure, of ocean currents, of light, and of

many other circumstances, are known to exert a powerful modifying

influence upon living organisms. These relations are still being worked

out in many directions, but the influence of Environment as a prime

factor in Variation is now a recognized doctrine of science.[81]

Even the popular mind has been struck with the curious adaptation of

nearly all animals to their _habitat_, for example in the matter of

color. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of the polar

bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes of the Bengal

tiger--as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed

themselves on its hide;--these, and a hundred others which will occur to

every one, are marked instances of adaptation to Environment, induced by

Natural Selection or otherwise, for the purpose, obviously in these

cases at least, of protection.

To continue the investigation of the modifying action of Environment

into the moral and spiritual spheres, would be to open a fascinating and

suggestive inquiry. One might show how the moral man is acted upon and

changed continuously by the influences, secret and open, of his

surroundings, by the tone of society, by the company he keeps, by his

occupation, by the books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short, that

constitutes the habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little world

of his daily choice. Or one might go deeper still and prove how the

spiritual life also is modified from outside sources--its health or

disease, its growth or decay, all its changes for better or for worse

being determined by the varying and successive circumstances in which

the religious habits are cultivated. But we must rather transfer our

attention to a second aspect of Environment, not perhaps so fascinating

but yet more important.

So much of the modern discussion of Environment revolves round the mere

question of Variation that one is apt to overlook a previous question.

Environment as a factor in life is not exhausted when we have realized

its modifying influence. Its significance is scarcely touched. The great

function of Environment is not to modify but to _sustain_. In sustaining

life, it is true, it modifies. But the latter influence is incidental,

the former essential. Our Environment is that in which we live and move

and have our being. Without it we should neither live or move nor have

any being. In the organism lies the principle of life; in the

Environment are the conditions of life. Without the fulfillment of these

conditions, which are wholly supplied by Environment, there can be no

life. An organism in itself is but a part; Nature is its complement.

Alone, cut off from its surroundings, it is not. Alone, cut off from my

surroundings, I am not--physically I am not. I am, only as I am

sustained. I continue only as I receive. My Environment may modify me,

but it has first to keep me. And all the time its secret transforming

power is indirectly moulding body and mind it is directly active in the

more open task of ministering to my myriad wants and from hour to hour

sustaining life itself.

To understand the sustaining influence of Environment in the animal

world, one has only to recall what the biologist terms the extrinsic or

subsidiary conditions of vitality. Every living thing normally requires

for its development an Environment containing air, light, heat, and

water. In addition to these, if vitality is to be prolonged for any

length of time, and if it is to be accompanied with growth and the

expenditure of energy, there must be a constant supply of food. When we

simply remember how indispensable food is to growth and work, and when

we further bear in mind that the food-supply is solely contributed by

the Environment, we shall realize at once the meaning and the truth of

the proposition that without Environment there can be no life. Seventy

per cent. at least of the human body is made of pure water, the rest of

gases and earth. These have all come from Environment. Through the

secret pores of the skin two pounds of water are exhaled daily from

every healthy adult. The supply is kept up by Environment. The

Environment is really an unappropriated part of ourselves. Definite

portions are continuously abstracted from it and added to the organism.

And so long as the organism continues to grow, act, think, speak, work,

or perform any other function demanding a supply of energy, there is a

constant, simultaneous, and proportionate drain upon its surroundings.

This is a truth in the physical, and therefore in the spiritual, world

of so great importance that we shall not mis-spend time if we follow it,

for further confirmation, into another department of nature. Its

significance in Biology is self-evident; let us appeal to Chemistry.

When a piece of coal is thrown on the fire, we say that it will radiate

into the room a certain quantity of heat. This heat, in the popular

conception, is supposed to reside in the coal and to be set free during

the process of combustion. In reality, however, the heat energy is only

in part contained in the coal. It is contained just as truly in the

coal's Environment--that is to say, in the oxygen of the air. The atoms

of carbon which compose the coal have a powerful affinity for the oxygen

of the air. Whenever they are made to approach within a certain

distance of one another, by the initial application of heat, they rush

together with inconceivable velocity. The heat which appears at this

moment, comes neither from the carbon alone, nor from the oxygen alone.

These two substances are really inconsumable, and continue to exist,

after they meet in a combined form, as carbonic acid gas. The heat is

due to the energy developed by the chemical embrace, the precipitate

rushing together of the molecules of carbon and the molecules of oxygen.

It comes, therefore, partly from the coal and partly from the

Environment. Coal alone never could produce heat, neither alone could

Environment. The two are mutually dependent. And although in nearly all

the arts we credit everything to the substance which we can weigh and

handle, it is certain that in the most cases the larger debt is due to

an invisible Environment.

This is one of those great commonplaces which slip out of general

reckoning by reason of their very largeness and simplicity. How

profound, nevertheless, are the issues which hang on this elementary

truth, we shall discover immediately. Nothing in this age is more needed

in every department of knowledge than the rejuvenescence of the

commonplace. In the spiritual world especially, he will be wise who

courts acquaintance with the most ordinary and transparent facts of

Nature; and in laying the foundations for a religious life he will make

no unworthy beginning who carries with him an impressive sense of so

obvious a truth as that without Environment there can be no life.

For what does this amount to in the spiritual world? Is it not merely

the scientific re-statement of the reiterated aphorism of Christ,

"Without Me ye can do nothing?" There is in the spiritual organism a

principle of life; but that is not self-existent. It requires a second

factor, a something in which to live and move and have its being, an

Environment. Without this it cannot live or move or have any being.

Without Environment the soul is as the carbon without the oxygen, as

the fish without the water, as the animal frame without the extrinsic

conditions of vitality.

And what is the spiritual Environment? It is God. Without this,

therefore, there is no life, no thought, no energy, nothing--"without Me

ye can do nothing."

The cardinal error in the religious life is to attempt to live without

an Environment. Spiritual experience occupies itself, not too much, but

too exclusively, with one factor--the soul. We delight in dissecting

this much tortured faculty, from time to time, in search of a certain

something which we call our faith--forgetting that faith is but an

attitude, an empty hand for grasping an environing Presence. And when we

feel the need of a power by which to overcome the world, how often do we

not seek to generate it within ourselves by some forced process, some

fresh girding of the will, some strained activity which only leaves the

soul in further exhaustion? To examine ourselves is good; but useless

unless we also examine Environment. To bewail our weakness is right, but

not remedial. The cause must be investigated as well as the result. And

yet, because we never see the other half of the problem, our failures

even fail to instruct us. After each new collapse we begin our life

anew, but on the old conditions; and the attempt ends as usual in the

repetition--in the circumstances the inevitable repetition--of the old

disaster. Not that at times we do not obtain glimpses of the true state

of the case. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense

upon us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting

for the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But the

lesson is soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to

our own achievement; and even the temporary success is mistaken for a

symptom of improved inward vitality. Once more we become self-existent.

Once more we go on living without an Environment. And once more, after

days of wasting without repairing, of spending without replenishing, we

begin to perish with hunger, only returning to God again, as a last

resort, when we have reached starvation point.

Now why do we do this? Why do we seek to breathe without an atmosphere,

to drink without a well? Why this unscientific attempt to sustain life

for weeks at a time without an Environment? It is because we have never

truly seen the necessity for an Environment. We have not been working

with a principle. We are told to "wait only upon God," but we do not

know why. It has never been as clear to us that without God the soul

will die as that without food the body will perish. In short, we have

never comprehended the doctrine of the Persistence of Force. Instead of

being content to transform energy we have tried to create it.

The Law of Nature here is as clear as Science can make it. In the words

of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth

which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount

of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and

equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] We are

dealing here with a simple question of dynamics. Whatever energy the

soul expends must first be "taken into it from without." We are not

Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge _and strength_. Communion

with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more

help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its

religious life than a common-sense hold of this plain biological

principle that without Environment he can do nothing. What he wants is

not an occasional view, but a principle--a basal principle like this,

broad as the universe, solid as nature. In the natural world we act upon

this law unconsciously. We absorb heat, breathe air, draw on Environment

all but automatically for meat and drink, for the nourishment of the

senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us from without,

can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual world we

have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare living

has to be acquired.

Now the great point in learning to live is to live naturally. As closely

as possible we must follow the broad, clear lines of the natural life.

And there are three things especially which it is necessary for us to

keep continually in view. The first is that the organism contains within

itself only one-half of what is essential to life; the second is that

the other half is contained in the Environment; the third, that the

condition of receptivity is simple union between the organism and the

Environment.

Translated into the language of religion these propositions yield, and

place on a scientific basis, truths of immense practical interest. To

say, first, that the organism contains within itself only one-half of

what is essential to life, is to repeat the evangelical confession, so

worn and yet so true to universal experience, of the utter helplessness

of man. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part, a

fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss at every turn of his

life an absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there is room

in him for more. That God is the other part, he feels, because at times

He satisfies his need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier

symptom of his incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his

helplessness with sin? But now he understands both--the void in his

life, the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other

energy, spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at

last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin.

This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal

state not only of this but of every organism--of every organism apart

from its Environment.

The entire dependence of the soul upon God is not an exceptional

mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and unprecedented

phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man is not taxed

beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by singular

limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made the

religious life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the spiritual

life are the same as for the natural life. When in their hours of

unbelief men challenge their Creator for placing the obstacle of human

frailty in the way of their highest development, their protest is

against the order of nature. They object to the sun for being the source

of energy and not the engine, to the carbonic acid being in the air and

not in the plant. They would equip each organism with a personal

atmosphere, each brain with a private store of energy; they would grow

corn in the interior of the body, and make bread by a special apparatus

in the digestive organs. They must, in short, have the creature

transformed into a Creator. The organism must either depend on his

environment, or be self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve the

arrangement by which man in his creatural life may have unbroken access

to an Infinite Power? What soul will seek to remain self-luminous when

it knows that "The Lord God is a _Sun_?" Who will not willingly exchange

his shallow vessel for Christ's well of living water? Even if the

organism, launched into being like a ship putting out to sea, possessed

a full equipment, its little store must soon come to an end. But in

contact with a large and bounteous Environment its supply is limitless.

In every direction its resources are infinite.

There is a modern school which protests against the doctrine of man's

inability as the heartless fiction of a past theology. While some forms

of that dogma, to any one who knows man, are incapable of defence, there

are others which, to any one who knows Nature, are incapable of denial.

Those who oppose it, in their jealousy for humanity, credit the organism

with the properties of Environment. All true theology, on the other

hand, has remained loyal to at least the root-idea in this truth. The

New Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it insists on the

fact of man's dependence. In its view the first step in religion is for

man to feel his helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is to the poor in

spirit. The condition of entrance into the spiritual kingdom is to

possess the child-spirit--that state of mind combining at once the

profoundest helplessness with the most artless feeling of dependence.

Substantially the same idea underlies the countless passages in which

Christ affirms that He has not come to call the righteous, but sinners

to repentance. And in that farewell discourse into which the Great

Teacher poured the most burning convictions of His life, He gives to

this doctrine an ever increasing emphasis. No words could be more solemn

or arresting than the sentence in the last great allegory devoted to

this theme, "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide

in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." The word here, it

will be observed again, is _cannot_. It is the imperative of natural

law. Fruit-bearing without Christ is not an improbability, but an

impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air

and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped

this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he

echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with Christ in God.

And that he embraced this not as a theory but as an experimental truth

we gather from his constant confession, "When I am weak, then am I

strong."

This leads by a natural transition to the second of the three points we

are seeking to illustrate. We have seen that the organism contains

within itself only one half of what is essential to life. We have next

to observe, as the complement of this, how the second half is contained

in the Environment.

One result of the due apprehension of our personal helplessness will be

that we shall no longer waste our time over the impossible task of

manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring to an abrupt

end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in

the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon this

once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of

things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only

one course is open to us. We must refer to Environment. The natural life

owes all to Environment, so must the spiritual. Now the Environment of

the spiritual life is God. As Nature therefore forms the complement of

the natural life, God is the complement of the spiritual.

The proof of this? That Nature is not more natural to my body than God

is to my soul. Every animal and plant has its own Environment. And the

further one inquires into the relations of the one to the other, the

more one sees the marvelous intricacy and beauty of the adjustments.

These wonderful adaptations of each organism to its surroundings--of the

fish to the water, of the eagle to the air, of the insect to the forest

bed; and of each part of every organism--the fish's swim-bladder, the

eagle's eye, the insect's breathing tubes--which the old argument from

design brought home to us with such enthusiasm, inspire us still with a

sense of the boundless resources and skill of Nature in perfecting her

arrangements for each single life. Down to the last detail the world is

made for what is in it; and by whatever process things are as they are,

all organisms find in surrounding Nature the ample complement of

themselves. Man, too, finds in his Environment provision for all

capacities, scope for the exercise of every faculty, room for the

indulgence of each appetite, a just supply for every want. So the

spiritual man at the apex of the pyramid of life finds in the vaster

range of his Environment a provision, as much higher, it is true, as he

is higher, but as delicately adjusted to his varying needs. And all

this is supplied to him just as the lower organisms are ministered to by

the lower environment, in the same simple ways, in the same constant

sequence, as appropriately and as lavishly. We fail to praise the

ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around us only because

its kindness is unobtrusive. Nature is always noiseless. All her

greatest gifts are given in secret. And we forget how truly every good

and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because no pause in

her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad lesson of deprivation.

It is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to find its life in God.

This is its native air. God as the Environment of the soul has been from

the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in religion.

How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this high thought will

appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out. True poetry is

only science in another form. And long before it was possible for

religion to give scientific expression to its greatest truths, men of

insight uttered themselves in psalms which could not have been truer to

Nature had the most modern light controlled the inspiration. "As the

hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O

God." What fine sense of the analogy of the natural and the spiritual

does not underlie these words. As the hart after its Environment, so man

after his; as the water-brooks are fitly designed to meet the natural

wants, so fitly does God implement the spiritual need of man. It will be

noticed that in the Hebrew poets the longing for God never strikes one

as morbid, or unnatural to the men who utter it. It is as natural to

them to long for God as for the swallow to seek her nest. Throughout all

their images no suspicion rises within us that they are exaggerating. We

feel how truly they are reading themselves, their deepest selves. No

false note occurs in all their aspiration. There is no weariness even in

their ceaseless sighing, except the lover's weariness for the

absent--if they would fly away, it is only to be at rest. Men who have

no soul can only wonder at this. Men who have a soul, but with little

faith, can only envy it. How joyous a thing it was to the Hebrews to

seek their God! How artlessly they call upon Him to entertain them in

His pavilion, to cover them with His feathers, to hide them in His

secret place, to hold them in the hollow of His hand or stretch around

them the everlasting arms! These men were true children of Nature. As

the humming-bird among its own palm-trees, as the ephemera in the

sunshine of a summer evening, so they lived their joyous lives. And even

the full share of the sadder experience of life which came to all of

them but drove them the further into the Secret Place, and led them with

more consecration to make, as they expressed it, "the Lord their

portion." All that has been said since from Marcus Aurelius to

Swedenborg, from Augustine to Schleiermacher of a besetting God as the

final complement of humanity is but a repetition of the Hebrew poets'

faith. And even the New Testament has nothing higher to offer man than

this. The psalmist's "God is our refuge and strength" is only the

earlier form, less defined, less practicable, but not less noble, of

Christ's "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest."

There is a brief phrase of Paul's which defines the relation with almost

scientific accuracy--"Ye are complete in Him." In this is summed up the

whole of the Bible anthropology--the completeness of man in God, his

incompleteness apart from God.

If it be asked, In what is man incomplete, or, In what does God complete

him? the question is a wide one. But it may serve to show at least the

direction in which the Divine Environment forms the complement of human

life if we ask ourselves once more what it is in life that needs

complementing. And to this question we receive the significant answer

that it is in the higher departments alone, or mainly, that the

incompleteness of our life appears. The lower departments of Nature are

already complete enough. The world itself is about as good a world as

might be. It has been long in the making, its furniture is all in, its

laws are in perfect working order; and although wise men at various

times have suggested improvements, there is on the whole a tolerably

unanimous vote of confidence in things as they exist. The Divine

Environment has little more to do for this planet so far as we can see,

and so far as the existing generation is concerned. Then the lower

organic life of the world is also so far complete. God, through

Evolution or otherwise, may still have finishing touches to add here and

there, but already it is "all very good." It is difficult to conceive

anything better of its kind than a lily or a cedar, an ant or an

ant-eater. These organisms, so far as we can judge, lack nothing. It

might be said of them, "they are complete in Nature." Of man also, of

man the animal, it may be affirmed that his Environment satisfies him.

He has food and drink, and good food and good drink. And there is in him

no purely animal want which is not really provided for, and that

apparently in the happiest possible way.

But the moment we pass beyond the mere animal life we begin to come upon

an incompleteness. The symptoms at first are slight, and betray

themselves only by an unexplained restlessness or a dull sense of want.

Then the feverishness increases, becomes more defined, and passes slowly

into abiding pain. To some come darker moments when the unrest deepens

into a mental agony of which all the other woes of earth are

mockeries--moments when the forsaken soul can only cry in terror for the

Living God. Up to a point the natural Environment supplies man's wants,

beyond that it only derides him. How much in man lies beyond that point?

Very much--almost all, all that makes man man. The first suspicion of

the terrible truth--so for the time let us call it--wakens with the

dawn of the intellectual life. It is a solemn moment when the

slow-moving mind reaches at length the verge of its mental horizon, and,

looking over, sees nothing more. Its straining makes the abyss but more

profound. Its cry comes back without an echo. Where is the Environment

to complete this rational soul? Men either find one--_One_--or spend the

rest of their days in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the

intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right

when he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must

be forever incomplete. Still more grave becomes man's case when he

begins further to explore his moral and social nature. The problems of

the heart and conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of

the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no triumph? Is the

unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the alternatives are two,

Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height of the

religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment, the

darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that men

are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No Environment

here is unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have--God, or

Nature, or Law. But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of

man's incompleteness. A witness more overwhelming is the prayer of the

Christian. What a very strange thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is

the symbol at once of his littleness and of his greatness. Here the

sense of imperfection, controlled and silenced in the narrower reaches

of his being, becomes audible. Now he must utter himself. The sense of

need is so real, and the sense of Environment, that he calls out to it,

addressing it articulately, and imploring it to satisfy his need. Surely

there is nothing more touching in Nature than this? Man could never so

expose himself, so break through all constraint, except from a dire

necessity. It is the suddenness and unpremeditatedness of Prayer that

gives it a unique value as an apologetic.

Man has three questions to put to his Environment, three symbols of his

incompleteness. They come from three different centers of his being. The

first is the question of the intellect, What is Truth? The natural

Environment answers, "Increase of Knowledge increaseth Sorrow," and

"much study is a Weariness." Christ replies, "Learn of Me, and ye shall

find Rest." Contrast the world's word "Weariness" with Christ's word

"Rest." No other teacher since the world began has ever associated

"learn" with "Rest." Learn of me, says the philosopher, and you shall

find Restlessness. Learn of Me, says Christ, and ye shall find Rest.

Thought, which the godless man has cursed, that eternally starved yet

ever living specter, finds at last its imperishable glory; Thought is

complete in Him. The second question is sent up from the moral nature,

Who will show us any good? And again we have a contrast: the world's

verdict, "There is none that doeth good, no, not one;" and Christ's,

"There is none good but God only." And finally, there is the lonely cry

of the spirit, most pathetic and most deep of all, Where is he whom my

soul seeketh? And the yearning is met as before, "I looked on my right

hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me; refuge failed

me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto Thee, O Lord: I said, Thou

are my refuge and my portion in the land of the living."[83]

Are these the directions in which men in these days are seeking to

complete their lives? The completion of Life is just now a supreme

question. It is important to observe how it is being answered. If we ask

Science or Philosophy they will refer us to Evolution. The struggle for

Life, they assure us, is steadily eliminating imperfect forms, and as

the fittest continue to survive we shall have a gradual perfecting of

being. That is to say, that completeness is to be sought for in the

organism--we are to be complete in Nature and in ourselves. To

Evolution, certainly, all men will look for a further perfecting of

Life. But it must be an Evolution which includes all the factors.

Civilization, it may be said, will deal with the second factor. It will

improve the Environment step by step as it improves the organism, or the

organism as it improves the Environment. This is well, and it will

perfect Life up to a point. But beyond that it cannot carry us. As the

possibilities of the natural Life become more defined, its

impossibilities will become the more appalling. The most perfect

civilization would leave the best part of us still incomplete. Men will

have to give up the experiment of attempting to live in half an

Environment. Half an Environment will give but half a Life. Half an

Environment? He whose correspondences are with this world alone has only

a thousandth part, a fraction, the mere rim and shade of an Environment,

and only the fraction of a Life. How long will it take Science to

believe its own creed, that the material universe we see around us is

only a fragment of the universe we do not see? The very retention of the

phrase "Material Universe," we are told, is the confession of our

unbelief and ignorance; since "matter is the less important half of the

material of the physical universe."[84]

The thing to be aimed at is not an organism self-contained and

self-sufficient, however high in the scale of being, but an organism

complete in the whole Environment. It is open to any one to aim at a

self-sufficient Life, but he will find no encouragement in Nature. The

Life of the body may complete itself in the physical world; that is its

legitimate Environment. The Life of the senses, high and low, may

perfect itself in Nature. Even the Life of thought may find a large

complement in surrounding things. But the higher thought, and the

conscience, and the religious Life, can only perfect themselves in God.

To make the influence of Environment stop with the natural world is to

doom the spiritual nature to death. For the soul, like the body, can

never perfect itself in isolation. The law for both is to be complete in

the appropriate Environment. And the perfection to be sought in the

spiritual world is a perfection of relation, a perfect adjustment of

that which is becoming perfect to that which is perfect.

The third problem, now simplified to a point, finally presents itself.

Where do organism and Environment meet? How does that which is becoming

perfect avail itself of its perfecting Environment? And the answer is,

just as in Nature. The condition is simple receptivity. And yet this is

perhaps the least simple of all conditions. It is so simple that we will

not act upon it. But there is no other condition. Christ has condensed

the whole truth into one memorable sentence, "As the branch cannot bear

fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye

abide in Me." And on the positive side, "He that abideth in Me the same

bringeth forth much fruit."

FOOTNOTES:

[81] _Vide_ Karl Semper's "The Natural Conditions of Existence as they

affect Animal Life;" Wallace's "Tropical Nature;" Weismann's "Studies in

the Theory of Descent;" Darwin's "Animals and Plants under

Domestication."

[82] "Principles of Biology," p. 57.

[83] Ps. cxlii. 4, 5.

[84] The "Unseen Universe," 6th Ed., p. 100.

CONFORMITY TO TYPE.

"'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me;

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean thy breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law--

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust

Or seal'd within the iron hills?"

--_In Memoriam._

"Until Christ be formed in you."--_Paul._

"The one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse

is tending--the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators

strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the

likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction,

that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents more

closely than anything else."--_Huxley._

If a botanist be asked the difference between an oak, a palm-tree and a

lichen, he will declare that they are separated from one another by the

broadest line known to classification. Without taking into account the

outward differences of size and form, the variety of flower and fruit,

the peculiarities of leaf and branch, he sees even in their general

architecture types of structure as distinct as Norman, Gothic and

Egyptian. But if the first young germs of these three plants are placed

before him and he is called upon to define the difference, he finds it

impossible. He cannot even say which is which. Examined under the

highest powers of the microscope they yield no clue. Analyzed by the

chemist with all the appliances of his laboratory they keep their

secret.

The same experiment can be tried with the embryos of animals. Take the

ovule of the worm, the eagle, the elephant, and of man himself. Let the

most skilled observer apply the most searching tests to distinguish one

from the other and he will fail. But there is something more surprising

still. Compare next the two sets of germs, the vegetable and the animal.

And there is still no shade of difference. Oak and palm, worm and man

all start in life together. No matter into what strangely different

forms they may afterward develop, no matter whether they are to live on

sea or land, creep or fly, swim or walk, think or vegetate, in the

embryo as it first meets the eye of Science they are indistinguishable.

The apple which fell in Newton's garden, Newton's dog Diamond, and

Newton himself, began life at the same point.[85]

If we analyze this material point at which all life starts, we shall

find it to consist of a clear structureless jelly-like substance

resembling albumen or white of egg. It is made of Carbon, Hydrogen,

Oxygen and Nitrogen. Its name is protoplasm. And it is not only the

structural unit with which all living bodies start in life, but with

which they are subsequently built up. "Protoplasm," says Huxley, "simple

or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the

Potter." "Beast and fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm and polype are

all composed of structural units of the same character, namely, masses

of protoplasm with a nucleus."[86]

What then determines the difference between different animals? What

makes one little speck of protoplasm grow into Newton's dog Diamond, and

another, exactly the same, into Newton himself? It is a mysterious

something which has entered into this protoplasm. No eye can see it. No

science can define it. There is a different something for Newton's dog

and a different something for Newton; so that though both use the same

matter they build it up in these widely different ways. Protoplasm being

the clay, this something is the Potter. And as there is only one clay

and yet all these curious forms are developed out of it, it follows

necessarily that the difference lies in the potters. There must in short

be as many potters as there are forms. There is the potter who segments

the worm, and the potter who builds up the form of the dog, and the

potter who moulds the man. To understand unmistakably that it is really

the potter who does the work, let us follow for a moment a description

of the process by a trained eye-witness. The observer is Mr. Huxley.

Through the tube of his microscope he is watching the development, out

of a speck of protoplasm, of one of the commonest animals: "Strange

possibilities," he says, "lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a

moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle and the plastic matter

undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their

succession that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled

modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel the

mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until

it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build

withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as

if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal

column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one

end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due

proportions in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour

by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion, that some

more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden

artist, with his plan before him, striving with skillful manipulation to

perfect his work."[87]

Besides the fact, so luminously brought out here, that the artist is

distinct from the "semi-fluid globule" of protoplasm in which he works,

there is this other essential point to notice, that in all his "skillful

manipulation" the artist is not working at random, but according to law.

He has "his plan before him." In the zoological laboratory of Nature it

is not as in a workshop where a skilled artisan can turn his hand to

anything--where the same potter one day moulds a dog, the next a bird,

and the next a man. In Nature one potter is set apart to make each. It

is a more complete system of division of labor. One artist makes all the

dogs, another makes all the birds, a third makes all the men. Moreover,

each artist confines himself exclusively to working out his own plan. He

appears to have his own plan somehow stamped upon himself, and his work

is rigidly to reproduce himself.

The Scientific Law by which this takes place is the Law of Conformity to

Type. It is contained, to a large extent, in the ordinary Law of

Inheritance; or it may be considered as simply another way of stating

what Darwin calls the Laws of Unity of Type. Darwin defines it thus: "By

Unity of Type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we

see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent

of their habits of life."[88] According to this law every living thing

that comes into the world is compelled to stamp upon its offspring the

image of itself. The dog, according to its type, produces a dog; the

bird a bird.

The artist who operates upon matter in this subtle way and carries out

this law is Life. There are a great many different kinds of Life. If one

might give the broader meaning to the words of the apostle: "All life is

not the same life. There is one kind of life of men, another life of

beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." There is the Life, or

the Artist, or the Potter who segments the worm, the potter who forms

the dog, the potter who moulds the man.[89]

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 dishevelled 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 here 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 fields 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?[90] Or that this new man was "begotten of God," God's

workmanship?[91] 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?"[92] Or this, "We

are changed into the same image from glory to glory?"[93] 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."[94]

One must confess that the originality of this entire New Testament

conception is most startling. Even for the nineteenth century it is the

most startling. But when one remembers that such an idea took form in

the first, one cannot fail to be impressed with a deepening wonder at

the system which begat and cherished it. Men seek the origin of

Christianity among philosophies of that age. Scholars contrast it still

with these philosophies, and scheme to fit it in to those of later

growth. Has it never occurred to them how much more it is than a

philosophy, that it includes a science, a Biology pure and simple? As

well might naturalists contrast zoology with chemistry, or seek to

incorporate geology with botany--the living with the dead--as try to

explain the spiritual life in terms of mind alone. When will it be seen

that the characteristic of the Christian Religion is its Life, that a

true theology must begin with a Biology? Theology is the Science of God.

Why will men treat God as inorganic?

If this analogy is capable of being worked out, we should expect answers

to at least three questions.

First: What corresponds to the protoplasm in the spiritual sphere?

Second: What is the Life, the Hidden Artist who fashions it?

Third: What do we know of the process and the plan?

First: The Protoplasm.

We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to imagine for a

moment that the new creature was to be found out of nothing. _Ex nihilo

nihil_--nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and

indestructible; Nature and man can only form and transform. Hence when a

new animal is made, no new clay is made. Life merely enters into already

existing matter, assimilates more of the same sort and re-builds it. The

spiritual Artist works in the same way. He must have a peculiar kind of

protoplasm, a basis of life, and that must be already existing.

Now we find this in the materials of character with which the natural

man is previously provided. Mind and character, the will and the

affections, the moral nature--these form the bases of spiritual life. To

look in this direction for the protoplasm of the spiritual life is

consistent with all analogy. The lowest or mineral world mainly supplies

the material--and this is true even for insectivorous species--for the

vegetable kingdom. The vegetable supplies the material for the animal.

Next in turn, the animal furnishes material for the mental, and lastly

the mental for the spiritual. Each member of the series is complete only

when the steps below it are complete; the highest demands all. It is not

necessary for the immediate purpose to go so far into the psychology

either of the new creature or of the old as to define more clearly what

these moral bases are. It is enough to discover that in this womb the

new creature is to be born, fashioned out of the mental and moral parts,

substance, or essence of the natural man. The only thing to be insisted

upon is that in the natural man this mental and moral substance or basis

is spiritually lifeless. However active the intellectual or moral life

may be, from the point of view of this other Life it is dead. That which

is flesh is flesh. It wants, that is to say, the kind of Life which

constitutes the difference between the Christian and the

not-a-Christian. It has not yet been "born of the Spirit."

To show further that this protoplasm possesses the necessary properties

of a normal protoplasm it will be necessary to examine in passing what

these properties are. They are two in number, the capacity for life and

plasticity. Consider first the capacity for life. It is not enough to

find an adequate supply of material. That must be of the right kind. For

all kinds of matter have not the power to be the vehicle of life--all

kinds of matter are not even fitted to be the vehicle of electricity.

What peculiarity there is in Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen,

when combined in a certain way, to receive life, we cannot tell. We only

know that life is always associated in Nature with this particular

physical basis and never with any other. But we are not in the same

darkness with regard to the moral protoplasm. When we look at this

complex combination which we have predicted as the basis of spiritual

life, we do find something which gives it a peculiar qualification for

being the protoplasm of the Christ-Life. We discover one strong reason

at least, not only why this kind of life should be associated with this

kind of protoplasm, but why it should never be associated with other

kinds which seem to resemble it--why, for instance, this spiritual life

should not be engrafted upon the intelligence of a dog or the instincts

of an ant.

The protoplasm in man has a something in addition to its instincts or

its habits. It has a capacity for God. In this capacity for God lies its

receptivity; it is the very protoplasm that was necessary. The chamber

is not only ready to receive the new Life, but the Guest is expected,

and, till He comes, is missed. Till then the soul longs and yearns,

wastes and pines, waving its tentacles piteously in the empty air,

feeling after God if so be that it may find Him. This is not peculiar to

the protoplasm of the Christian's soul. In every land and in every age

there have been altars to the Known or Unknown God. It is now agreed as

a mere question of anthropology that the universal language of the human

soul has always been "I perish with hunger." This is what fits it for

Christ. There is a grandeur in this cry from the depths which makes its

very unhappiness sublime.

The other quality we are to look for in the soul is mouldableness,

plasticity. Conformity demands conformability. Now plasticity is not

only a marked characteristic of all forms of life, but in a special

sense of the highest forms. It increases steadily as we rise in the

scale. The inorganic world, to begin with, is rigid. A crystal of silica

dissolved and redissolved a thousand times will never assume any other

form than the hexagonal. The plant next, though plastic in its elements,

is comparatively insusceptible of change. The very fixity of its sphere,

the imprisonment for life in a single spot of earth, is the symbol of a

certain degradation. The animal in all parts is mobile, sensitive, free;

the highest animal, man, is the most mobile, the most at leisure from

routine, the most impressionable, the most open for change. And when we

reach the mind and soul, this mobility is found in its most developed

form. Whether we regard its susceptibility to impressions, its

lightning-like response even to influences the most impalpable and

subtle, its power of instantaneous adjustment, or whether we regard the

delicacy and variety of its moods, or its vast powers of growth, we are

forced to recognize in this the most perfect capacity for change. This

marvellous plasticity of mind contains at once the possibility and

prophecy of its transformation. The soul, in a word, is made to be

_converted_.

Second: The Life.

The main reason for giving the Life, the agent of this change, a

separate treatment, is to emphasize the distinction between it and the

natural man on the one hand, and the spiritual man on the other. The

natural man is its basis, the spiritual man is its product, the Life

itself is something different. Just as in an organism we have these

three things--formative matter, formed matter, and the forming principle

or life; so in the soul we have the old nature, the renewed nature, and

the transforming Life.

This being made evident, little remains here to be added. No man has

ever seen this Life. It cannot be analyzed, or weighed, or traced in its

essential nature. But this is just what we expected. This invisibility

is the same property which we found to be peculiar to the natural life.

We saw no life in the first embryos, in oak, in palm, or in bird. In the

adult it likewise escapes us. We shall not wonder if we cannot see it in

the Christian. We shall not expect to see it. _A fortiori_ we shall not

expect to see it, for we are further removed from the coarser

matter--moving now among ethereal and spiritual things. It is because it

conforms to the law of this analogy so well that men, not seeing it,

have denied its being. Is it hopeless to point out that one of the most

recognizable characteristics of life is its unrecognizableness, and that

the very token of its spiritual nature lies in its being beyond the

grossness of our eyes?

We do not pretend that Science can define this Life to be Christ. It has

no definition to give even of its own life, much less of this. But there

are converging lines which point, at least, in the direction that it is

Christ. There was One whom history acknowledges to have been the Truth.

One of His claims was this, "I am the Life." According to the doctrine

of Biogenesis, life can only come from life. It was His additional claim

that His function in the world was to give men Life. "I am come that ye

might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." This could

not refer to the natural life, for men had that already. He that hath

the Son hath another Life. "Know ye not your own selves how that Jesus

Christ is in you."

Again, there are men whose characters assume a strange resemblance to

Him who was the Life. When we see the bird-character appear in an

organism we assume that the Bird-Life has been there at work. And when

we behold Conformity to Type in a Christian, and know moreover that the

type-organization can be produced by the type-life alone does this not

lend support to the hypothesis that the Type-Life also has been here at

work? If every effect demands a cause, what other cause is there for the

Christian? When we have a cause, and an adequate cause, and no other

adequate cause; when we have the express statement of that Cause that he

is that cause, what more is possible? Let not Science, knowing nothing

of its own life, go further than to say it knows nothing of this Life.

We shall not dissent from its silence. But till it tells us what it is,

we wait for evidence that it is not this.

Third: The Process.

It is impossible to enter at length into any details of the great

miracle by which this protoplasm is to be conformed to the Image of the

Son. We enter that province now only so far as this Law of Conformity

compels us. Nor is it so much the nature of the process we have to

consider as its general direction and results. We are dealing with a

question of morphology rather than of physiology.

It must occur to one on reaching this point, that a new element here

comes in which compels us, for the moment, to part company with zoology.

That element is the conscious power of choice. The animal in following

the type is blind. It does not only follow the type involuntarily and

compulsorily, but does not know that it is following it. We might

certainly have been made to conform to the Type in the higher sphere

with no more knowledge or power of choice than animals or automata. But

then we should not have been men. It is a possible case, but not

possible to the kind of protoplasm with which men are furnished. Owing

to the peculiar characteristics of this protoplasm an additional and

exceptional provision is essential.

The first demand is that being conscious and having this power of

choice, the mind should have an adequate knowledge of what it is to

choose. Some revelation of the Type, that is to say, is necessary. And

as that revelation can only come from the Type, we must look there for

it.

We are confronted at once with the Incarnation. There we find how the

Christ-Life has clothed Himself with matter, taken literal flesh, and

dwelt among us. The Incarnation is the Life revealing the Type. Men are

long since agreed that this is the end of the Incarnation--the revealing

of God. But why should God be revealed? Why, indeed, but for man? Why

but that "beholding as in a glass the glory of the only begotten we

should be changed into the same image?"

To meet the power of choice, however, something more was necessary than

the mere revelation of the Type--it was necessary that the Type should

be the highest conceivable Type. In other words, the Type must be an

Ideal. For all true human growth, effort, and achievement, an ideal is

acknowledged to be indispensable. And all men accordingly whose lives

are based on principle, have set themselves an ideal, more or less

perfect. It is this which first deflects the will from what is based,

and turns the wayward life to what is holy. So much is true as mere

philosophy. But philosophy failed to present men with their ideal. It

has never been suggested that Christianity has failed. Believers and

unbelievers have been compelled to acknowledge that Christianity holds

up to the world the missing Type, the Perfect Man.

The recognition of the Ideal is the first step in the direction of

Conformity. But let it be clearly observed that it is but a step. There

is no vital connection between merely seeing the Ideal and being

conformed to it. Thousands admire Christ who never become Christians.

But the great question still remains, How is the Christian to be

conformed to the Type, or as we should now say, dealing with

consciousness, to the Ideal? The mere knowledge of the Ideal is no more

than a motive. How is the process to be practically accomplished? Who is

to do it? Where, when, how? This is the test question of Christianity.

It is here that all theories of Christianity, all attempts to explain it

on natural principles, all reductions of it to philosophy, inevitably

break down. It is here that all imitations of Christianity perish. It is

here, also, that personal religion finds its most fatal obstacle. Men

are all quite clear about the Ideal. We are all convinced of the duty of

mankind regarding it. But how to secure that willing men shall attain

it--that is the problem of religion. It is the failure to understand the

dynamics of Christianity that has most seriously and most pitifully

hindered its growth both in the individual and in the race.

From the standpoint of biology this practical difficulty vanishes in a

moment. It is probably the very simplicity of the law regarding it that

has made men stumble. For nothing is so invisible to most men as

transparency. The law here is the same biological law that exists in the

natural world. For centuries men have striven to find out ways and means

to conform themselves to this type. Impressive motives have been

pictured, the proper circumstances arranged, the direction of effort

defined, and men have toiled, struggled, and agonized to conform

themselves to the Image of the Son. Can the protoplasm _conform itself_

to its type? Can the embryo _fashion itself_? Is Conformity to Type

produced by the matter _or by the life_, by the protoplasm or by the

Type? Is organization the cause of life or the effect of it? It is the

effect of it. Conformity to Type, therefore, is secured by the type.

Christ makes the Christian.

Men need only reflect on the automatic processes of their natural body

to discover that this is the universal law of Life. What does any man

consciously do, for instance, in the matter of breathing? What part does

he take in circulating the blood, in keeping up the rhythm of his heart?

What control has he over growth? What man by taking thought can add a

cubit to his stature? What part voluntarily does man take in secretion,

in digestion, in the reflex actions? In point of fact is he not after

all the veriest automaton, every organ of his body given him, every

function arranged for him, brain and nerve, thought and sensation, will

and conscience, all provided for him ready made? And yet he turns upon

his soul and wishes to organize that himself! O preposterous and vain

man, thou who couldest not make a finger-nail of thy body, thinkest thou

to fashion this wonderful, mysterious, subtle soul of thine after the

ineffable Image? Wilt thou ever permit thyself _to be_ conformed to the

Image of the Son? Wilt thou, who canst not add a cubit to thy stature,

submit _to be_ raised by the Type-Life within thee to the perfect

stature of Christ?

This is a humbling conclusion. And therefore men will resent it. Men

will still experiment "by works of righteousness which they have done"

to earn the Ideal life. The doctrine of Human Inability, as the Church

calls it, has always been objectionable to men who do not know

themselves. The doctrine itself, perhaps, has been partly to blame.

While it has been often affirmed in such language as rightly to humble

men, it has also been stated and cast in their teeth with words which

could only insult them. Merely to assert dogmatically that man has no

power to move hand or foot to help himself toward Christ, carries no

real conviction. The weight of human authority is always powerless, and

ought to be, where the intelligence is denied a rationale. In the light

of modern science when men seek a reason for every thought of God or

man, this old doctrine with its severe and almost inhuman aspect--till

rightly understood--must presently have succumbed. But to the biologist

it cannot die. It stands to him on the solid ground of Nature. It has a

reason in the laws of life which must resuscitate it and give it another

lease of years. Bird-Life makes the Bird. Christ-Life makes the

Christian. No man by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature.

So much for the scientific evidence. Here is the corresponding statement

of the truth from Scripture. Observe the passive voice in these

sentences: "_Begotten_ of God;" "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;" or this, "Predestinate _to be conformed_

to the Image of His Son;" or again, "Until Christ _be formed_ in you;"

or "Except a man _be born again_ he cannot see the Kingdom of God;"

"Except a man _be born_ of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter the

Kingdom of God." There is one outstanding verse which seems at first

sight on the other side: "Work out your own salvation with fear and

trembling;" but as one reads on he finds, as if the writer dreaded the

very misconception, the complement, "For it is God which worketh in you

both to will and to do of His good pleasure."

It will be noticed in these passages, and in others which might be

named, that the process of transformation is referred indifferently to

the agency of each Person of the Trinity in turn. We are not concerned

to take up this question of detail. It is sufficient that the

transformation is wrought. Theologians, however, distinguish thus: the

indirect agent is Christ, the direct influence is the Holy Spirit. In

other words, Christ by his Spirit renews the souls of men.

Is man, then, out of the arena altogether? Is he mere clay in the hands

of the potter, a machine, a tool, an automaton? Yes and No. If he were a

tool he would not be a man. If he were a man he would have something to

do. One need not seek to balance what God does here, and what man does.

But we shall attain to a sufficient measure of truth on a most delicate

problem if we make a final appeal to the natural life. We find that in

maintaining this natural life Nature has a share and man has a share. By

far the larger part is done for us--the breathing, the secreting, the

circulating of the blood, the building up of the organism. And although

the part which man plays is a minor part, yet, strange to say, it is not

less essential to the well being, and even to the being, of the whole.

For instance, man has to take food. He has nothing to do with it after

he has once taken it, for the moment it passes his lips it is taken in

hand by reflex actions and handed on from one organ to another, his

control over it, in the natural course of things, being completely lost.

But the initial act was his. And without that nothing could have been

done. Now whether there be an exact analogy between the voluntary and

involuntary functions in the body, and the corresponding processes in

the soul, we do not at present inquire. But this will indicate, at

least, that man has his own part to play. Let him choose Life; let him

daily nourish his soul; let him forever starve the old life; let him

abide continuously as a living branch in the Vine, and the True-Vine

Life will flow into his soul, assimilating, renewing, conforming to

Type, till Christ, pledged by His own law, be formed in him.

We have been dealing with Christianity at its most mystical point. Mark

here once more its absolute naturalness. The pursuit of the Type is just

what all Nature is engaged in. Plant and insect, fish and reptile, bird

and mammal--these in their several spheres are striving after the Type.

To prevent its extinction, to ennoble it, to people earth and sea and

sky with it; this is the meaning of the Struggle for Life. And this is

our life--to pursue the Type, to populate the world with it.

Our religion is not all a mistake. We are not visionaries. We are not

"unpractical," as men pronounce us, when we worship. To try to follow

Christ is not to be "righteous overmuch." True men are not rhapsodizing

when they preach; nor do those waste their lives who waste themselves in

striving to extend the Kingdom of God on earth. This is what life is

for. The Christian in his life-aim is in strict line with Nature. What

men call his supernatural is quite natural.

Mark well also the splendor of this idea of salvation. It is not merely

final "safety," to be forgiven sin, to evade the curse. It is not,

vaguely, "to get to heaven." It is to be conformed to the Image of the

Son. It is for these poor elements to attain to the Supreme Beauty. The

organizing Life being Eternal, so must this Beauty be immortal. Its

progress toward the Immaculate is already guaranteed. And more than all

there is here fulfilled the sublimest of all prophecies; not Beauty

alone but Unity is secured by the Type--Unity of man and man, God and

man, God and Christ and man till "all shall be one."

Could Science in its most brilliant anticipations for the future of its

highest organism ever have foreshadowed a development like this? Now

that the revelation is made to it, it surely recognizes it as the

missing point in Evolution, the climax to which all Creation tends.

Hitherto Evolution had no future. It was a pillar with marvelous

carving, growing richer and finer toward the top, but without a capital;

a pyramid, the vast base buried in the inorganic, towering higher and

higher, tier above tier, life above life, mind above mind, ever more

perfect in its workmanship, more noble in its symmetry, and yet withal

so much the more mysterious in its aspiration. The most curious eye,

following it upward, saw nothing. The cloud fell and covered it. Just

what men wanted to see was hid. The work of the ages had no apex. But

the work begun by Nature is finished by the Supernatural--as we are wont

to call the higher natural. And as the veil is lifted by Christianity it

strikes men dumb with wonder. For the goal of Evolution is Jesus Christ.

The Christian life is the only life that will ever be completed. Apart

from Christ the life of man is a broken pillar, the race of men an

unfinished pyramid. One by one in sight of Eternity all human Ideals

fall short, one by one before the open grave all human hopes dissolve.

The Laureate sees a moment's light in Nature's jealousy for the Type;

but that too vanishes.

"'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.'"

All shall go? No, one Type remains. "Whom He did foreknow He also did

predestinate to be conformed to the Image of His Son." And "when Christ

who is our life shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in

glory."

FOOTNOTES:

[85] "There is, indeed, a period in the development of every tissue and

every living thing known to us when there are actually no _structural_

peculiarities whatever--when the whole organism consists of transparent,

structureless, semi-fluid living bioplasm--when it would not be possible

to distinguish the growing moving matter which was to evolve the oak

from that which was the germ of a vertebrate animal. Nor can any

difference be discerned between the bioplasm matter of the lowest,

simplest, epithelial scale of man's organism and that from which the

nerve cells of his brain are to be evolved. Neither by studying bioplasm

under the microscope nor by any kind of physical or chemical

investigation known, can we form any notion of the nature of the

substance which is to be formed by the bioplasm, or what will be the

ordinary results of the living."--"Bioplasm," Lionel S. Beale, F.R.S.,

pp. 17, 18.

[86] Huxley: "Lay Sermons," 6th Ed., pp. 127, 129.

[87] Huxley: "Lay Sermons," 6th Ed., p. 261.

[88] "Origin of Species," p. 166.

[89] There is no intention here to countenance the old doctrine of the

permanence of species. Whether the word species represent a fixed

quantity or the reverse does not affect the question. The facts as

stated are true in contemporary zoology if not in palaeontology. It may

also be added that the general conception of a definite Vital Principle

is used here simply as a working hypothesis. Science may yet have to

give up what the Germans call the "ontogenetic directive Force." But in

the absence of any proof to the contrary, and especially of any

satisfactory alternative, we are justified in working still with the old

theory.

[90] 2 Cor. v. 17.

[91] 1 John v. 18; 1 Pet. i. 3.

[92] Col. iii. 9, 10.

[93] 2 Cor. iii. 18.

[94] Rom. viii. 29.

SEMI-PARASITISM.

"The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet

occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered,

despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere

is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be

free."--_Carlyle._

"Work out your own salvation."--_Paul._

"Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its

food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to

degeneration."--_E. Ray Lankester._

Parasites are the paupers of Nature. They are forms of life which will

not take the trouble to find their own food, but borrow or steal it from

the more industrious. So deep-rooted is this tendency in Nature, that

plants may become parasitic--it is an acquired habit--as well as

animals; and both are found in every state of beggary, some doing a

little for themselves, while others, more abject, refuse even to prepare

their own food.

There are certain plants--the Dodder, for instance--which begin life

with the best intentions, strike true roots into the soil, and really

appear as if they meant to be independent for life. But after supporting

themselves for a brief period they fix curious sucking discs into the

stem and branches of adjacent plants. And after a little experimenting,

the epiphyte finally ceases to do anything for its own support,

thenceforth drawing all its supplies ready-made from the sap of its

host. In this parasitic state it has no need for organs of nutrition of

its own, and Nature therefore takes them away. Henceforth, to the

botanist, the adult Dodder presents the degraded spectacle of a plant

without a root, without a twig, without a leaf, and having a stem so

useless as to be inadequate to bear its own weight.

In the Mistletoe the parasitic habit has reached a stage in some

respects lower still. It has persisted in the downward course for so

many generations that the young forms even have acquired the habit and

usually begin life at once as parasites. The Mistletoe berries, which

contain the seed of the future plant, are developed especially to

minister to this degeneracy, for they glue themselves to the branches of

some neighboring oak or apple, and there the young Mistletoe starts as a

dependent from the first.

Among animals these _lazzaroni_ are more largely represented still.

Almost every animal is a living poor-house, and harbors one or more

species of _epizoa_ or _entozoa_, supplying them gratis, not only with a

permanent home, but with all the necessaries and luxuries of life.