Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/170

156 ago, added a new kingdom to Nature, or inaugurated a new or higher order of spiritual truths impossible before that time, impossible to Plato or Plutarch, he wants the fact put in harmony with the rest of our knowledge of the universe. It is commonly believed that the course of Nature is independent of historical events, and that the ways of God to man from the beginning have been just what they are to-day.

What perpetually irritates the disinterested reader of Drummond's book is the assumption everywhere met with that the author is speaking with the authority of science, when he is only echoing the conclusions of theology. Hear him on the differences between the Christian and the non-Christian:

"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 same 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.... When from vegetable life we rise to animal life, here again we find something original and unique—unique at least as compared with the animal. 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 natural man belongs essentially to this present order of things. He is endowed simply with a higher 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."

In the chapter on classification this distinction is further elaborated, and a picture drawn of the merely moral or upright man, that leaves him very low down indeed in the scale of life, when contrasted with the Scotch Presbyterian. He is still a stone compared with the plant: "Here, for example, are two characters, pure and elevated, adorned with conspicuous virtues, stirred by lofty impulses, and commanding a spontaneous admiration from all who look upon them—may not this similarity of outward form be accompanied by a total dissimilarity of inward nature?" And he adds that the difference is really as profound and basal as that between the organic and the inorganic.

As rhetoric, or as theology, one need care little for all this; but