Natural Law in the Spiritual World Part 4

Are we forsaking the lines of Science in saying so? Yes and No. Science has drawn for us the distinction. It has no voice as to the nature of the distinction except this--that the new endowment is a something different from anything else with which it deals. It is not ordinary Vitality, it is not intellectual, it is not moral, but something beyond.

And Revelation steps in and names what it is--it is Christ. Out of the mult.i.tude of sentences where this announcement is made, these few may be selected: "Know ye not your own selves how that _Jesus Christ is in you_?"[44] "Your bodies are the members of Christ."[45] "At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you."[46] "We will come unto him and make our abode with him."[47] "I am the Vine, ye are the branches."[48] "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."[49]

Three things are clear from these statements: First, they are not mere figures of rhetoric. They are explicit declarations. If language means anything these words announce a literal fact. In some of Christ's own statements the literalism is if possible still more impressive. For instance, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood _dwelleth in Me and I in him_."

In the second place, Spiritual Life is not something outside ourselves.

The idea is not that Christ is in heaven and that we can stretch out some mysterious faculty and deal with Him there. This is the vague form in which many conceive the truth, but it is contrary to Christ's teaching and to the a.n.a.logy of nature. Vegetable Life is not contained in a reservoir somewhere in the skies, and measured out spasmodically at certain seasons. The Life is _in_ every plant and tree, inside its own substance and tissue, and continues there until it dies. This localization of Life in the individual is precisely the point where Vitality differs from the other forces of nature, such as magnetism and electricity. Vitality has much in common with such forces as magnetism and electricity, but there is one inviolable distinction between them--that Life is permanently fixed and rooted in the organism. The doctrines of conservation and transformation of energy, that is to say, do not hold for Vitality. The electrician can demagnetize a bar of iron, that is, he can transform its energy of magnetism into something else--heat, or motion, or light--and then re-form these back into magnetism. For magnetism has no root, no individuality, no fixed indwelling. But the biologist cannot devitalize a plant or an animal and revivify it again.[50] Life is not one of the homeless forces which promiscuously inhabit s.p.a.ce, or which can be gathered like electricity from the clouds and dissipated back again into s.p.a.ce. Life is definite and resident; and Spiritual Life is not a visit from a force, but a resident tenant in the soul.

This is, however, to formulate the statement of the third point, that Spiritual Life is not an ordinary form of energy or force. The a.n.a.logy from Nature indorses this, but here Nature stops. It cannot say what Spiritual Life is. Indeed what natural Life is remains unknown, and the word Life still wanders through Science without a definition. Nature is silent, therefore, and must be as to Spiritual Life. But in the absence of natural light we fall back upon that complementary revelation which always s.h.i.+nes, when truth is necessary and where Nature fails. We ask with Paul when this Life first visited him on the Damascus road, What is this? "Who art Thou, Lord?" And we hear, "I am Jesus."[51]

We must expect to find this denied. Besides a proof from Revelation, this is an argument from experience. And yet we shall still be told that this Spiritual Life is a force. But let it be remembered what this means in Science, it means the heresy of confounding Force with Vitality. We must also expect to be told that this Spiritual Life is simply a development of ordinary Life--just as Dr. Bastian tells us that natural Life is formed according to the same laws which determine the more simple chemical combinations. But remember what this means in Science.

It is the heresy of Spontaneous Generation, a heresy so thoroughly discredited now that scarcely an authority in Europe will lend his name to it. Who art Thou, Lord? Unless we are to be allowed to hold Spontaneous Generation there is no alternative: Life can only come from Life: "I am Jesus."

A hundred other questions now rush into the mind about this Life: How does it come? Why does it come? How is it manifested? What faculty does it employ? Where does it reside? Is it communicable? What are its conditions? One or two of these questions may be vaguely answered, the rest bring us face to face with mystery. Let it not be thought that the scientific treatment of a Spiritual subject has reduced religion to a problem of physics, or demonstrated G.o.d by the laws of biology. A religion without mystery is an absurdity. Even Science has its mysteries, none more inscrutable than around this Science of Life. It taught us sooner or later to expect mystery, and now we enter its domain. Let it be carefully marked, however, that the cloud does not fall and cover us till we have ascertained the most momentous truth of Religion--that Christ is in the Christian.

Not that there is anything new in this. The Churches have always held that Christ was the source of Life. No spiritual man ever claims that his spirituality is his own. "I live," he will tell you; "nevertheless it is not I, but Christ liveth in me." Christ our Life has indeed been the only doctrine in the Christian Church from Paul to Augustine, from Calvin to Newman. Yet, when the Spiritual man is cross-examined upon this confession it is astonis.h.i.+ng to find what uncertain hold it has upon his mind. Doctrinally he states it adequately and holds it unhesitatingly. But when pressed with the literal question he shrinks from the answer. We do not really believe that the Living Christ has touched us, that He makes His abode in us. Spiritual Life is not as real to us as natural Life. And we cover our retreat into unbelieving vagueness with a plea of reverence, justified, as we think, by the "Thus far and no farther" of ancient Scriptures. There is often a great deal of intellectual sin concealed under this old aphorism. When men do not really wish to go farther they find it an honorable convenience sometimes to sit down on the outermost edge of the Holy Ground on the pretext of taking off their shoes. Yet we must be certain that, making a virtue of reverence, we are not merely excusing ignorance; or, under the plea of mystery, evading a truth which has been stated in the New Testament a hundred times, in the most literal form, and with all but monotonous repet.i.tion. The greatest truths are always the most loosely held. And not the least of the advantages of taking up this question from the present standpoint is that we may see how a confused doctrine can really bear the luminous definition of Science and force itself upon us with all the weight of Natural Law.

What is mystery to many men, what feeds their wors.h.i.+p, and at the same time spoils it, is that area round all great truth which is really capable of illumination, and into which every earnest mind is permitted and commanded to go with a light. We cry mystery long before the region of mystery comes. True mystery casts no shadows around. It is a sudden and awful gulf yawning across the field of knowledge; its form is irregular, but its lips are clean cut and sharp, and the mind can go to the very verge and look down the precipice into the dim abyss--

"Where writhing clouds unroll, Striving to utter themselves in shapes."

We have gone with a light to the very verge of this truth. We have seen that the Spiritual Life is an endowment from the Spiritual World, and that the Living Spirit of Christ dwells in the Christian. But now the gulf yawns black before us. What more does Science know of life?

Nothing. It knows nothing further about its origin in detail. It knows nothing about its ultimate nature. It cannot even define it. There is a helplessness in scientific books here, and a continual confession of it which to thoughtful minds is almost touching. Science, therefore, has not eliminated the true mysteries from our faith, but only the false.

And it has done more. It has made true mystery scientific. Religion in having mystery is in a.n.a.logy with all around it. Where there is exceptional mystery in the Spiritual world it will generally be found that there is a corresponding mystery in the natural world. And, as Origen centuries ago insisted, the difficulties of Religion are simply the difficulties of Nature.

One question more we may look at for a moment. What can be gathered on the surface as to the process of Regeneration in the individual soul?

From the a.n.a.logies of Biology we should expect three things: First, that the New Life should dawn suddenly; Second, that it should come "without observation;" Third, that it should develop gradually. On two of these points there can be little controversy. The gradualness of growth is a characteristic which strikes the simplest observer. Long before the word Evolution was coined Christ applied it in this very connection--"First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." It is well known also to those who study the parables of Nature that there is an ascending scale of slowness as we rise in the scale of Life. Growth is most gradual in the highest forms. Man attains his maturity after a score of years; the monad completes its humble cycle in a day. What wonder if development be tardy in the Creature of Eternity? A Christian's sun has sometimes set, and a critical world has seen as yet no corn in the ear. As yet? "As yet," in this long Life, has not begun.

Grant him the years proportionate to his place in the scale of Life.

"The time of harvest is _not yet_."

Again, in addition to being slow, the phenomena of growth are secret.

Life is invisible. When the New Life manifests itself it is a surprise.

_Thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth._ When the plant lives whence has the Life come? When it dies whither has it gone?

_Thou canst not tell ... so is every one that is born of the Spirit. For the kingdom of G.o.d cometh without observation._

Yet once more--and this is a point of strange and frivolous dispute--this Life comes suddenly. This is the only way in which Life can come. Life cannot come gradually--health can, structure can, but not Life. A new theology has laughed at the Doctrine of Conversion. Sudden Conversion especially has been ridiculed as untrue to philosophy and impossible to human nature. We may not be concerned in b.u.t.tressing any theology because it is old. But we find that this old theology is scientific. There may be cases--they are probably in the majority--where the moment of contact with the Living Spirit though sudden has been obscure. But the real moment and the conscious moment are two different things. Science p.r.o.nounces nothing as to the conscious moment. If it did it would probably say that that was seldom the real moment--just as in the natural Life the conscious moment is not the real moment. The moment of birth in the natural world is not a conscious moment--we do not know we are born till long afterward. Yet there are men to whom the Origin of the New Life in time has been no difficulty. To Paul, for instance, Christ seems to have come at a definite period of time, the exact moment and second of which could have been known. And this is certainly, in theory at least, the normal Origin of Life, according to the principles of Biology. The line between the living and the dead is a sharp line.

When the dead atoms of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, are seized upon by Life, the organism at first is very lowly. It possesses few functions. It has little beauty. Growth is the work of time. But Life is not. That comes in a moment. At one moment it was dead; the next it lived. This is conversion, the "pa.s.sing," as the Bible calls it, "from Death unto Life." Those who have stood by another's side at the solemn hour of this dread possession have been conscious sometimes of an experience which words are not allowed to utter--a something like the sudden snapping of a chain, the waking from a dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] "Beginnings of Life." By H. C. Bastian, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.

Macmillan, vol. ii. p. 633.

[34] "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley. F.R.S., p. 239.

[35] _Nineteenth Century_, 1878, p. 507.

[36] This being the crucial point it may not be inappropriate to supplement the quotations already given in the text with the following:--

"We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf--the gulf of all gulfs--that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it--the mighty gulf between death and life."--"As Regards Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., p.

42.

"The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living."--Huxley, "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (new Ed.). Art. "Biology."

"Whoever recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made very recently to discover a decided support for the _generatio aequivoca_ in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world, will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life."--Virchow: "The Freedom of Science in the Modern State."

"All really scientific experience tells us that life can be produced from a living antecedent only."--"The Unseen Universe," 6th Ed., p. 229.

[37] John iii.

[38] Rom. viii. 6.

[39] Rev. iii. 1.

[40] 1 Tim. v. 6.

[41] Eph. ii. 1, 5.

[42] 1 Cor. ii. 14.

[43] "First Principles," 2d Ed., p. 17.

[44] 2 Cor. xii. 5.

[45] 1 Cor. vi. 15.

[46] John xiv. 20.

[47] John xiv. 21-23.

[48] John xv. 4.

[49] Gal. ii. 20.

[50] One must not be misled by popular statements in this connection, such as this of Professor Owen's: "There are organisms which we can devitalize and revitalize--devive and revive--many times." (_Monthly Microscopical Journal_, May, 1869, p. 294.) The reference is of course to the extraordinary capacity for _resuscitation_ possessed by many of the Protozoa and other low forms of life.

[51] Acts ix. 5.

DEGENERATION.

"I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw and considered it well; I looked upon it and received instruction."--_Solomon._

"How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?"--_Hebrews._

"We have as possibilities either Balance, or Elaboration, or Degeneration."--_E. Ray Lankester._