icle, no dead chemical substance has ever been
made a constituent of organic tissue except through the agency of life.
We may, perhaps with profit, carry the analogy a step farther. The plant
is unable to advance its own tissue to the animal plane. Though it be
the recognized order of nature that the "animal kingdom" is dependent
upon the "vegetable kingdom" for its sustenance, the substance of the
plant may become part of the animal organism only as the latter reaches
down from its higher plane and by its own vital action incorporates the
vegetable compounds with itself. In turn, animal matter can never
become, even transitorily, part of a human body, except as the living
man assimilates it, and by the vital processes of his own existence
lifts, for the time being, the substance of the animal that supplied him
food to the higher plane of his own existence. The comparison herein
employed is admittedly defective if carried beyond reasonable limits of
application; for the raising of mineral matter to the plane of the
plant, vegetable tissue to the level of the animal, and the elevation of
either to the human plane, is but a temporary change; with the
dissolution of the higher tissues the material thereof falls again to
the level of the inanimate and the dead. But, as a means of illustration
the analogy may not be wholly without value.

So, for the advancement of man from his present fallen and relatively
degenerate state to the higher condition of spiritual life, a power
above his own must cooperate. Through the operation of the laws
obtaining in the higher kingdom man may be reached and lifted; himself
he cannot save by his own unaided effort.[65] A Redeemer and Savior of
mankind is beyond all question essential to the realization of the plan
of the Eternal Father, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal
life of man";[66] and that Redeemer and Savior is Jesus the Christ,
beside whom there is and can be none other.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3.

1. God's Foreknowledge Not a Determining Cause.--"Respecting the
foreknowledge of God, let it not be said that divine omniscience is of
itself a determining cause whereby events are inevitably brought to
pass. A mortal father, who knows the weaknesses and frailties of his
son, may by reason of that knowledge sorrowfully predict the calamities
and sufferings awaiting his wayward boy. He may foresee in that son's
future a forfeiture of blessings that could have been won, loss of
p