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."