02 - Life
CHAPTER II
LIFE The things which we are most familiar with and which lie the nearest to us, are generally those we find the hardest to define; that is, to state the class they belong to, and how they differ from other things of that class. What, for instance, is life? We look to science for an answer, and we get no better than a relative definitiop. We are told that life is sensitiveness to environment. The dead body has lost that sensitiveness. The sun shines on it without heating it. The cold wind blows upon it without adding to its chill. No strange sound avails to awaken it to attention. It is irresponsive to all that is round it; and this is death, as its power to respond was life.
Although the definition is superficial, it is not worthless. It answers, after a fashion, to some of the uses of the word in the Scriptures, where life is spoken of relatively. We are made “alive unto God in Jesus Christ,” when the Son makes the Father more real to us, so that this greatest of all the facts in our environment enters into our experience, and ceases to be a notion of the mind.
Natural life having so much that is mysterious about it, we may expect spiritual life to be a mystery. But the one mystery casts light upon the other, especially through their resemblances.
I. Prof. Drummond emphasizes the fact that life is derivable only from life. The spontaneous generation of a living being from dead matter is unknown to science, although some have believed it possible, and a very few have claimed that they witnessed it. In all such cases we have reason to believe that the difficult task of eliminating living germs from the substances in which the experiment was made was not complete. In the latest of them, the evidences that life resulted are too faint and feeble for even a materialist to pin his faith to, however anxious he might be to believe this. That this spontaneous and natural transition from dead matter to the living organism, without the intervention of any living agency, creative or generative, is necessary to complete the materialist theory of the world as it stands, is warrant enough for us to exact the most decisive proofs from those who tell us they have observed such a transition.*
* Professor Tyndall, in his Belfast Address (1874), declared that matter possessed the promise and the potency of all forms of existence. But he rejected every alleged instance of spontaneous generation of life, as do almost all the thinkers of his school. Haeckel is the notable exception. The transition from the dead to the living, from the inorganic to the organic world, cannot be traced to any operation of dead forces. It must have had its commencement in a creative act, v^hich made a new beginning. The existence of life in even its humblest forms implies a living Creator, shaping his works in an increasing likeness to himself. Life is a perpetual challenge to the materialist, for the forces his theory recognizes and implies would have left the world with no higher organization than the rock crystal. A still more direct challenge is found in the presence of moral life in the human species, with its sense of right and wrong, of duty and of sin. As Professor Huxley said in his “Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics” (1893), nature knows nothing of right and wrong, and has no place for ethical distinctions. Their origin must be sought elsewhere. That they are real, implies the activity of a creative will, which has raised our race to an honor above the beasts, and has clothed us with a dignity and a responsibility which are supernatural. In making this concession, the author of “Man’s Place in Nature”
(1863), admitted that man has a place above nature, of which natural science can give us no account.
II. This is as true of the restoration of life as of its inception. That the race of men came down from the first level of their created dignity by a fall or apostasy, which has implanted what Kant calls ’’a radical evil in human nature,” is the teaching both of the Bible and of manifold Gentile traditions. It is pecuHar to the Bible that it shows that God did not consent that this fall should be the law of human life, but undertook to retrieve it by renewing the spiritual life of mankind.
Here again there was a new beginning, through the birth of a divine life into the world in the incarnation of the Son of God. Our divine Lord is a new vital force added to the spiritual resources of the world. We cannot resolve this force into any felicitous combination of elements already existing in human history. Skeptical historians and critics have attempted again and again to show that nothing radically different from the previous course of affairs took place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian Era, that Jesus was a happy blending of Hebraic and Hellenic elements into a novel combination, that the facts as to his life and his acts have been obscured by wondering disciples, and so forth. After all these efforts, he stands out against the background of the world’s history as a unique and original spiritual fact, a “new thing” which was added to the spiritual forces of the world at the opening of that era from which the greatest peoples count their years. If the whole New Testament were annihilated, or had never been written, the reach and the scope of the influence he exerted upon men of his own age and of every age since his ascension, would present to the unbelieving critic just the same puzzle as they now have to solve. It is through the existence of the apostolic records that we and they are furnished with the only key to that puzzle. They tell us that the new life that dawned upon the world came from the life of the Son of God, who came that we “may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
Parallel with the redemption of the race is the regeneration of the individual. The deadness and insensitiveness to spiritual facts which sin has produced in us not only has no remedy in nature, but is itself of the nature of a “law of sin and death,” by which we are sunk farther and farther in evil through the evil already admitted into our wills. It is a law of reaping as we have sowed, by which ever-increasing harvests of wrong are gathered in our experience. Science, philosophy, and the world offer us no remedy for this. They speak only of the certainty that every cause will work on to its natural effects, and every reaping must be after the fashion of the sowing. They may bring us alleviations, but no cure. Apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ there is not the smallest reason for us to expect that any bad man will ever become a good one, or that the canker of sin will ever cease to gnaw into the life it has once attacked. Nothing less than the impartation of a new life will suffice to stop the processes of spiritual destruction already begun in us, and to make us so alive unto God that we shall live in holy obedience to his laws, and in the enjo3mient of his peace. For the individual man as for the race, it is life from life.
III. Life is the great unifier. It builds up its organisms by gathering into one the lifeless particles of inorganic matter, and shaping these into tissues and organs which no skill of human manipulation can reproduce.
Whether in vegetable or animal form, it effects combinations which cannot be repeated by the most skillful mechanisms or chemical manipulations. We recognize its products as standing apart from all that are not the result of the play of vital force, and as constituting unities of a higher order than either physics or chemistry can furnish.
Henry Brooke, in his curious book, “The Fool of Quality” (1760-1777), has an admirable statement of this truth: —
“Every particle of matter has a self, or distinct entity, inasmuch as it cannot be any other particle of matter. Now while it continues in this state of selfishness, or absolute distinction, it is utterly useless and insignificant, and is to the universe as though it were not. But w^ien the divine Intelligence hath harmonized certain qualities of such distinct particles into certain animal or vegetable systems, each yields up its powers for the benefit of the whole, and then and then only becomes capable and productive of shape, coloring, beauty — flowers, fragrance, and fruits. This operation in matter is no other than a manifestation of a like process in mind; and no soul ever was capable of any degree of virtue or happiness save so far as it was drawn away in its affections from self; save so far as it is engaged in wishing, contriving, endeavoring, promoting, and rejoicing in the welfare and happiness of others.” So long as man stands aloof in the isolation of a spiritual atom, with his thoughts all centering in himself, under the influence either of his selfish propensities, or his more selfish pharisaic pride, he is spiritually dead. When he is got off his own center, is brought under the influence of a life that lies beyond himself, and finds a center which is not in himself, he comes to life, and through that life is bound to his fellowmen. Our Lord did not come into the world merely to save individual sinners from their sins, and to fit them for heaven. He came to set up a kingdom or order of human Hfe under an unseen King, in which men should live in more natural and human relations with each other than ever before. This kingdom finds its highest expression in his church, but it embraces the family and the nation in its scope, as institutions divinely established for the welfare of mankind. It brings to these the “life that working strongly binds” man to man more closely than ever before.
(a) He has made the family a new thing within the sphere of his influence, abolishing polygamy, lifting the wife to her rightful place of honor, purifying the affections and refining the manners of all Christian households. He has turned the hearts of the fathers to the children and of the children to the fathers, emancipating the child from the virtual slavery of the old order and securing him the rights of a human being.
(b) His influence upon the life of the Christian state has been less fully recognized, as being less palpable, though not less real. Outside of Christendom there is little sense of the brotherhood which binds a nation in one, so that all the members suffer when one is wronged or prostrated by disaster. Mr. J. Talboys Wheeler, in his “Short History of India” (1880), describing the apathy with which the natives regarded the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756), remarks: ’This utter want of politicalties among the masses of India is the cause of their depression. Individually, they are the kindest and most compassionate people in the world, but outside their own little circle of family or caste they are utterly heedless of what is going on. Within the last few years there has been a change for the better; the famines have enlarged their sympathies, and the political future of the Hindu people is more hopeful now than at any former period of their history.” It has been through two hundred years of contact with Christian ideas that they have changed for the better, and have begun to realize that they have a share in the sufferings of their countrymen. So the awakening of China to this sense has found expression in a general refusal to have any dealings with our own country, because of the indignities to which their countrymen have been subjected in visiting America. The leaders in this movement are those who have imbibed Christian ideas on the subject through an education in western science and literature, and who have become editors of the popular newspapers of the country. They are bringing the hundreds of millions of Chinamen to feel that they are wronged in every wrong inflicted upon a countryman of theirs, as they are one body poHtic.
It is especially in Christian nations that this feeling has the largest scope and finds the fullest expression. Through it a new stage of political development has been reached, in which the whole strength and power of the state is brought to bear in defense of the rights of the humblest citizen. The Christian state has become the organized unselfishness of the whole people for the protection of every member of the body politic. Nor does it stop with the assertion and maintenance of rights. As Mazzini well says, nations do not exist by the maintenance of rights merely, but through heroism, and through self-sacrifice. It is through their citizens being willing to “go the second mile” that they maintain their existence and their authority. Their history is the story of great deeds done for the common weal, where mere rights were not at stake.
(c) In what might be called the biological passages of his epistles (Romans 12:4-9; 1 Corinthians 12:12-30; Ephesians 3:6; Ephesians 4:4-6; Colossians 1:17-24; Colossians 2:18-19; Colossians 3:15), the apostle Paul applies this principle to the church, and illustrates the nature of our fellowship with our Head and with each other from comparison with the human body. It is his favorite form of declaring that our Lord came to establish a kingdom among men, and he anticipates modern sociologists in the use of this analogy to explain the social unities and functions. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another.”
IV. Growth is a characteristic of life. Dead things never grow. They may enlarge by the accretion of dead particles, as do the stalactites in a lime cave; but these particles have no organic unity, so that none of them renders any service to the whole, or fills any place which the rest could not. A tree adds to its bulk year by year, by adding each year a fresh layer of woody fiber to its trunk, and by extending its old branches and putting forth new. These additions are parts of its organism, and sharers of its fortunes as an organism. With its decay, they would show a diminished vitality, and with its death they would die. It is only the living tree that goes on adding to its bulk. So in the spiritual life: its reality is shown by its growth. In a memorable passage of his “ApologiaproVita Sua” (1864), the late Cardinal Newman says: “The writer to whom (humanly speaking) I owe my soul was Thomas Scott of Aston-Sandford... I used almost as proverbs what I considered the scope and issue of his doctrine, ’Holiness before peace/ and ’Growth, the only evidence of life.’ “ The disposition in Thomas Scott’s time was to rest the proof of the possession of the Christian life upon a single experience, called “a. hopeful work of grace.” He justly insisted that this can be no more than the first step in Christian living, and that “growth in grace” is the demand of the gospel, equally with repentance unto life, and personal acquaintance with God. Dr. Trumbull tells of hearing a man say, “All my class is converted now, and I look upon my work as done.” It had but begun, for the training of those young Christians all lay before him. So we see now, for we all agree with Thomas Scott, that real life will find its expression in growth.
We all, indeed, are growing inwardly as well as outwardly, but, as Henry Ward Beecher says, it is of great importance to observe what it is that grows most in us. Is it our intimacy with God, or the affairs and pleasures of the world? Is it our vision of what lies on a level with our eyes, or of what lies above that level? Is it the interest in the things that we must leave behind us at death, or in what we can carry into the life beyond death?
V. Along with growth goes continuity. The tree is the same tree year after year, and even century after century. The big redwood on the slopes of the Sierras carries on its inner layers the brand left by a fire before the days of King Solomon; and it is just the same tree that then spread its branches over the remote ancestors of the bears and coyotes which range those mountains today.
It is the longest-lived of all the living things known to us, but it has not lost its organic identity through the lapse of millenniums. So with our bodily life. We do not leave it behind us, whatever the changes it undergoes. It may be that every physical particle which once constituted the body has been eliminated and replaced by another. Yet it retains the same character throughout all changes. We carry to our graves the scars of injuries we received in early infancy. Our hair retains the same hue, our eyes the same color, our faces the same physiognomy, as when we were children. Our photographs taken at different ages show marked resemblances, along with the differences the years have brought us. So of our inward life: we are still the same selves that we were when we first “found ourselves,” as conscious human beings. We lose nothing of our identity with the lapse of years. When I was a small boy, I threw a stone at a robin redbreast, and broke its leg. I was ashamed of it then; I am ashamed of it now. Although I beheve it has been forgiven me by the Maker of the robin, I shall never forget the wanton cruelty of the act. It has kept me from doing anything that would hurt a bird during the years which have elapsed since then. I know it was I who did it; that I was, and am, the small whiteheaded scamp who picked up that stone and flung it with all his might, and — for once — did not miss the mark. So of many a worse act or neglect in the intervening years: I am the one who did or omitted to do these things, and never can I escape the identity or the responsibility.
“Upon me lies a burden which I cannot shift,” says Frederick Maurice, “upon any other human creature — the burden of duties unfulfilled, words unspoken, or spoken violently and untruly; of holy relationships neglected; of days wasted forever; of evil thoughts once cherished, which are ever appearing as fresh as when they were first admitted into the heart; of talents cast away; of affections in myself or in others trifled with; of light within turned to darkness. So speaks the conscience; so speaks or has spoken the conscience of each man.”
It is just this unbroken identity which is the most terrible fact of an evil life, as it is the basis of the remorse which darkens its present, and may forever darken its future, with despair.
Memory is terribly faithful in its record of evil things; how faithful has been shown to some at moments of extreme peril, when the whole past, with all its details, has been flashed as in an instant upon their mental vision. It is from such experiences that we come to understand the statement that when the dead stand before God, there will be an opening of the book for each of the human race, and that the dead will be judged out of the things which are written in the books (Revelation xx:i2). Unless there be some cleansing power which can efface the dreadful records kept by the heart, then a future of remorse and misery is all that is possible to every one who has defiled his conscience with sin. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:7-9). Without that cleansing, there is no gospel for men.
There is, however, a joyful side to this truth of the continuity of life — it is that we need leave nothing behind us that is worth taking along with us. It is, indeed, our duty and our right to lay aside the limitations which cramp each age of life, and yet to carry with us all that belongs to the strength and the insight of that age. The apostle says that when he became a man, he put away what was childish; but he did not lay aside what was childlike in his nature. The true Christian, whatever his years or his experience, never ceases to be a child in all the qualities which bring the child near to the gate of the kingdom. Our Lord told Nicodemus that to b’ born anew (or from above) is the prerequisite for entering the kingdom (John 3:3, John 3:5); and he told the apostles that “whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein” (Luke 18:17). The birth from above renews us into childlikeness, jvist as we were born into natural childhood by natural birth. And to emphasize the relation, he set a little child in the midst when he set forth the nature of regeneration.
Some people have been puzzled to see how children are saved. The gospel says the difficulty lies in getting grown people to become children for their salvation. To do that, they must lay aside their hard worldly wisdom; their dullness in the sense of right and wrong; their fretting about to-morrow; their lack of simple dependence upon our Father in heaven; their unreadiness to trust him for the grandest things he promises; their want of any sense of the wonder in the world and in life; their resentful malice toward those who have injured them. Our Lord himself, in his growth into manhood, left nothing behind him that belonged to a perfect child. It would have been better if the revisers had left untouched the passage in which the church speaks to the Father of “thy holy Child Jesus” (Acts iv:3o), for while the Greek word has also the sense of “servant,” yet its primary meaning cannot have been far from the thought of the apostle.
Wordsworth, the first modern poet who has opened the book of childhood to us, gives expression to the Christian idea: — My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky, So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each in natural piety.
VI. Nature, to a superficial view, seems to foretell death as the end of life. The living thing dies and passes away in the dissolution of the organism into its elements; the dead thing alone remains the same.
Nature, however, abounds in intimations that life may pass through and survive deathlike changes, v^hich open upon another and a nobler existence. One of these is the transformation which insects undergo in passing from the chrysalis stage of their existence to that in which they attain the full growth and freedom. This transformation helped the Greeks at least to believe in a life after death. They gave the name Psyche (soul) to the butterfly, because they saw in its passage from a creeping grub to a flying thing a parable and prophecy of the change death would work upon themselves.
Mrs. Alfred Gatty, in one of her beautiful parables of nature, takes as an instance the larva of the dragon fly, whose life is spent under water until he is overtaken by languor and pain, and is driven to climb the stalk of some waterplant toward the surface. His kindred follow him with pity and sympathy, and think of him as lost and gone, when he emerges from his shell, and changes into a swift and strong master of flight, whose “four gauzy pinions flash back the sunshine.” Nor can he return to the state in which he had lived, to explain to his brothers the change he has undergone. They go on mourning his loss, while the empty shell that had contained him clings to the stem by which he had climbed. In other cases the larva buries itself in the earth when the period of change approaches, and rises from its grave to the higher existence. Mrs. Trumbull-Slosson makes a beautiful use of this in one of the stories of her “Seven Dreamers.”
While there is no simple organism which does not look forward to the change we call death, there are complex organisms, each with a life of its own, whose nature implies immortality. The nation is one of these, and the church is another.
Some theorists have run the parallel so far between the life of the individual man and that of the nation as to predict a time of necessary decay and a final death for every one of them. Nations, however, die only by suicide, through a general selfishness displacing public spirit, and the love of country perishing out of the hearts of the people. History, as Dr. Elisha Mulford, in his great book on “The Nation,” says, is not a series of funerals. England has seen a thousand years of national life, and is as full of vitality as at any earlier stage of her existence. The church also is a deathless organization.
She came into existence when Peter, in the name of the Twelve, uttered the great confession; and in that moment our Lord pronounced the grand promise that the gates of Hades, the power of death, should never prevail against her. At times, she has seemed to fall into a sleep that might have proved deadly; but always she was quickened into a fresh life by the indwelling Spirit, roused to a new sense of the work she had to do for God, and equipped with new instruments to do it, in the persons of prophets and reformers, preachers and singers. So she lives on through the ages, an immortal organization, with part of her membership in this world of conflict, and part in the world of triumph beyond death, but all gathered under the one Head which is Christ (Ephesians 1:10).