--but that larger form of Evolution which
includes among its factors the double Law of Biogenesis and the immense
further truth that this involves.

What is further included in this complex correspondence we shall have
opportunity to illustrate afterwards. [1] Meantime let it be noted on
what the Christian argument for Immortality really rests. It stands upon
the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical
Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[1] _Vide_ "Conformity to Type," page 287.

It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that
Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said,
"that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly."
And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is
clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a
metaphorical meaning on the commonest word of the New Testament is to
violate every canon of interpretation, and at the same time to charge
the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an
unusual use of so exact a vehicle for expressing definite thought as the
Greek language, and that on the most momentous subject of which He ever
spoke to men. It is a canon of interpretation, according to Alford, that
"a figurative sense of words is never admissible except when required by
the context." The context, in most cases, is not only directly
unfavorable to a figurative meaning, but in innumerable instances in
Christ's teaching Life is broadly contrasted with Death. In the teaching
of the apostles, again, we find that, without exception, they accepted
the term in its simple literal sense. Reuss defines the apostolic belief
with his usual impartiality when--and the quotation is doubly pertinent
here--he discovers in the apostle's conception of Life, first, "the idea
of a real existence, an existence such as is proper to God and to the
Word; an imperishable existence--that is to say, not subject to the
vicissitudes and imperfections of the finite world. This primary idea is
repeatedly expressed, at least in a negative form; it leads to a
doctrine of immortality, or, to speak more correctly, of life, far
surpassing any that had been expressed in the formulas of the current
philosophy or theology, and resting upon premises and conceptions
altogether different. In fact, it can dispense both with the
philosophical thesis of the immateriality or indestru