(Scripture Reading Exercise.)
"LIFE FROM LIFE"--SPIRITUAL LIFE FROM SPIRIT.
ANALYSIS
I. The Gospel Regarded as the Power of God.
II. Spiritual Life from Spiritual Life--"Ye Must Be Born Again."
III. Parallel between the Organic and Inorganic Worlds.
IV. Parallel between the Spiritual and Natural Worlds.
V. The Difference Between the Spiritual and the Natural Man.
REFERENCES
"Natural Law in the Spiritual World," Henry Drummond; and the Scripture
passages cited in the body of the lesson.
_SPECIAL TEXT: "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know
them, because they are spiritually discerned." (I Cor. ii:14.)_
DISCUSSION.
_1. The Gospel the Power of God Unto Salvation:_ We have now
reached the place in the development of our theme where it takes on
a strong personal interest. The gospel is the "power of God unto
salvation."[A] It is so for us--for all men. "Ye must be born again;
* * * except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter
into the Kingdom of God."[B] Is this new birth possible to all? We
must needs think so if the Gospel is available to all; and that is
a fact so patent to both justice and revelation that it requires no
discussion. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son
that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting
life." This alone sufficiently proclaims the universal right of men
to the hopes and to the saving powers of the Gospel. "Ye must be born
again!" "Born of the water and of the Spirit." Then with that new birth
will there come new life? And what will that life be? "That which is
born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit,
is Spirit,"[C] said the Christ. Spirit birth then is the aim of the
Christian baptism--baptism of water and of the Spirit being the two
parts of the one thing, the first being preparatory for and leading up
to the second, its complement. And with this there draws tremendous
consequences.
[Footnote A: Rom. i:16.]
[Footnote B: St. John iii:5.]
[Footnote C: St. John iii:6.]
_2. Spiritual Biogenesis: Spirit Life from Spirit Life:_ Henry
Drummond in his "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" has a chapter
entitled "Biogenesis"--meaning thereby that life comes from life,
and he holds that life can come in no other way than from life, and
contravenes the theory that life comes of spontaneous generation. "So
far as science can settle anything," he observes, "this question is
settled. The attempt to get the living out of the dead has failed.
Spontaneous generation has had to be given up. And it is now recognized
on every hand that Life can only come from the touch of Life. Huxley
categorically announces that the doctrines of Biogenesis, or life
only from life, is "victorious along the whole line at the present
day."[A] And even whilst confessing that he wishes the evidence were
the other way, Tyndall is compelled to say, "I affirm that no shred of
trustworthy experimental testimony exists to prove that life i our day
has ever appeared independently of antecedent life."[B]
[Footnote A: "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley, F. R. S., p. 239.]
[Footnote B: Nineteenth Century Review, 1878, p. 507.]
Our author parallels this fact of "life from life" in the spiritual
world, and holds it to be as rigidly true in the one world as in the
other. "The Spiritual Life," he holds to be "the gift of the Living
Spirit."
The theory opposed to this is "that a man may become gradually better
and better until in the course of the process he reaches that quality
of religious nature known as 'Spiritual Life.' This Life is not
something added as extra to the natural man; it is the normal and
appropriate development of the natural man." This theory parallels the
theory of spontaneous generation in natural life. To this Drummond
opposes "Biogenesis"--the law of life from life in the spiritual
world. "The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man.
He is a New Creation born from above. As well expect a hay infusion to
become gradually more and more living until in course of the process
it reached vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to
attain the Eternal Life."
Our author then draws a strong parallel between the natural and
spiritual kingdoms on this subject of biogenesis--"life from life."
_3. The Law of Biogenesis in the Natural World:_ "Let us first
place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two great kingdoms
of nature, the inorganic and organic, as these now stand in the light
of the Law of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying
that there is no Spontaneous Generation of Life? It is meant that
the passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is
hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked
off from the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed
from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no
chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution
can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of
Life. Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living
form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality,
without this preliminary contact with Life they remain fixed in the
inorganic sphere for ever. It is a very mysterious Law which guards in
this way the portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in
Nature more worth pondering for its strangeness it is the spectacle of
this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the
Law of Biogenesis and denied for ever the possibility of resurrection
within itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in
Nature that Science has long and urgently sought to obliterate it.
Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern
persistency that the assaults upon this Law for number and thoroughness
have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test.
Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical Laws may
explain the inorganic world: the biological Laws may account for the
development of the organic. But of the point where they meet, of that
strange borderland between the dead and the living. Science is silent.
It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands
of Nature, but reserved a point at the genesis of Life for His direct
appearing.
"The power of the analogy, for which we are laying the foundations, to
seize and impress the mind, will largely depend on the vividness with
which one realizes the gulf which Nature places between the living and
the dead. But those who, in contemplating Nature, have found their
attention arrested by this extraordinary dividing-line severing the
visible universe eternally into two: those who in watching the progress
of science have seen barrier after barrier disappear--barrier between
plant and plant, between animal and animal, and even between animal and
plant--but this gulf yawning more hopelessly wide with every advance
of knowledge, will be prepared to attach a significance to the Law of
Biogenesis and its analogies more profound perhaps than to any other
fact or law in Nature. If, as Pascal says, Nature is an image of grace;
if the things that are seen are in any sense the images of the unseen,
there must lie in this great gulf fixed, this most unique and startling
of all natural phenomena, a meaning of peculiar moment."
_4. The Law of Biogenesis in the Spiritual World:_ "Where now in
the Spiritual spheres shall we meet a companion phenomenon to this?
What in the Unseen shall be likened to this deep dividing-line, or
where in human experience is another barrier which never can be crossed?
"There is such a barrier. In the dim but not inadequate vision of the
Spiritual World presented in the Word of God, the first thing that
strikes the eye is a great gulf fixed. The passage from the Natural
World to the Spiritual World is hermetically sealed on the natural
side. The door from the inorganic to the organic is shut, no mineral
can open it; so the door from the natural to the spiritual is shut,
and no man can open it. This world of natural men is staked off from
the Spiritual World by barriers which have never yet been crossed from
within. No organic change, no modification of environment, no mental
energy, no moral effort, no evolution of character, no progress of
civilization can endow any single human soul with the attribute of
spiritual life. The spiritual world is guarded from the world next in
order beneath it by a law of Biogenesis--except a man be born again * *
* except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the
Kingdom of God.
"It is not said, in this enunciation of the Law, that if the condition
be not fulfilled the natural man will not enter the Kingdom of God. The
word is cannot. For the exclusion of the spiritually inorganic from
the kingdom of the spiritually organic is not arbitrary. Nor is the
natural man refused admission on unexplained grounds. His admission is
a scientific impossibility. Except a mineral be born "from above"--from
the kingdom just above it--it cannot enter the kingdom just above it
And except a man be born "from above," by the same law, he cannot enter
the kingdom just above him. There being no passage from one kingdom to
another, whether from inorganic to organic, or from organic [natural]
to spiritual, the intervention of Life is a scientific necessity if a
stone or a plant or an animal or a man is to pass from a lower to a
higher sphere. The plant stretches down to the dead world beneath it,
touches its minerals and gases with its mystery of life, and brings
them up ennobled and transformed to the living sphere. The breath of
God, blowing where it listeth, touches with its mystery of Life the
dead souls of men, bears them across the bridgeless gulf between the
natural and the spiritual, between the spiritually inorganic and the
spiritually organic, endows them with its own high qualities, and
develops within them these new and secret faculties, by which those who
are born again are said to see the Kingdom of God.
_5. Distinction Between the Natural and the Spiritual Man:_
"Our author next proceeds with the application of his principle by
drawing the distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian
man--between one "born of the Spirit," and one not "born of the Spirit."
"What now, let us ask specifically, distinguishes a Christian man from
a non-Christian man? Is it that he has certain mental characteristics
not possessed by the other? Is it that certain faculties have
been trained in him, that morality assumes special and higher
manifestations, and character a nobler form? Is the Christian merely
an ordinary man who happens from birth to have been surrounded with a
peculiar set of ideas? Is his religion merely that peculiar quality
of the moral life defined by Mr. Matthew Arnold as "morality touched
by emotion?" And does the possession of a high ideal, benevolent
sympathies, a reverent spirit, and a favorable environment account for
what men call his Spiritual Life?
"The distinction between them is the same as that between the organic
and the inorganic, the living and the dead. What is the difference
between a crystal and an organism, a stone and a plant. They have much
in common. Both are made of the same atoms. Both display the same
properties of matter. Both are subject to the physical laws. Both may
be very beautiful. But besides possessing all that the crystal has, the
plant possesses something more--a mysterious something called life.
This life is not something which existed in the crystal only in a less
developed form. There is nothing at all like it in the crystal. There
is nothing like the first beginning of it in the crystal, not a trace
or symptom of it. This plant is tenanted by something new, an original
and unique possession added over and above all the properties common
to both. When from vegetable life we rise to animal life, here again
we find something original and unique--unique at least as compared
with the mineral. From animal life we ascend again to spiritual life.
And here also is something new, something still more unique. He who
lives the spiritual life has a distinct kind of life added to all the
other phases of life which he manifests--a kind of life infinitely
more distinct than is the active life of a plant from the inertia of
a stone. The spiritual man is more distinct in point of fact than
is the plant from the stone. This is the one possible comparison in
nature, for it is the widest distinction in nature; but compared with
the difference between the natural and the spiritual the gulf which
divides the organic from the inorganic is a hair's breadth. The natural
man belongs essentially to this present order of things. He is endowed
simply with a high quality of the natural animal life. But it is life
of so poor a quality that it is not life at all. He that hath not
the Son hath not life; but he that hath the Son hath life--a new and
distinct and supernatural endowment. He is not of this world. He is of
the timeless state, of eternity. It doth not yet appear what he shall
be.
"The difference then between the spiritual man and the natural man
is not a difference of development, but of generation. It is a
distinction of quality, not of quantity. A man cannot rise by any
natural development from "morality touched by emotion," to "morality
touched by life." Were we to construct a scientific classification,
science would compel us to arrange all natural men, moral or immoral,
educated or vulgar, as one family. One might be high in the family
group, another low; yet, practically, they are marked by the same set
of characteristics--they eat, sleep, work, think, live, die. But the
spiritual man is removed from this family so utterly by the possession
of an additional characteristic that a biologist, fully informed of
the whole circumstances, would not hesitate a moment to classify him
elsewhere. And if he really entered into these circumstances it would
not be in another family but in another kingdom. It is an old fashioned
theology which divides the world in this way--which speaks of men as
Living and Dead, lost and saved--a stern theology all but fallen into
disuse. This difference between the living and the dead in souls is so
unproved by casual observation, so impalpable in itself, so startling
as a doctrine, that schools of culture have ridiculed or denied the
grim distinction. Nevertheless the grim distinction must be retained.
It is a scientific distinction. "He that hath not the Son hath not
Life."[A]
[Footnote A: He that has not spiritually been born is not spiritually
alive.]
"Now it is this great law which finally distinguishes Christianity from
all other religions. It places the religion of Christ upon a footing
altogether unique. There is no analogy between the Christian religion
and, say, Buddhism or the Mohammedan religion. There is no true sense
in which a man can say. He that hath Buddha hath life. Buddha has
nothing to do with life. He may have something to do with morality.
He may stimulate, impress, teach, guide, but there is no distinct
new thing added to the souls of those who profess Buddhism. These
religions may be developments of the natural, mental, or moral man. But
Christianity professes to be more. It is the mental or moral man plus
something else or some One else. It is the infusion into the spiritual
man of a new life, of a quality unlike anything else in nature. This
constitutes the separate Kingdom of Christ, and gives to Christianity
alone of all the religions of mankind the strange mark of divinity.