t unique and startling
of all natural phenomena, a meaning of peculiar moment.

Where now in the Spiritual spheres shall we meet a companion phenomena
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 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 t