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.