eems to have come at a definite period of time, the exact moment
and second of which could have been known. And this is certainly, in
theory at least, the normal Origin of Life, according to the principles
of Biology. The line between the living and the dead is a sharp line.
When the dead atoms of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, are seized
upon by Life, the organism at first is very lowly. It possesses few
functions. It has little beauty. Growth is the work of time. But Life is
not. That comes in a moment. At one moment it was dead; the next it
lived. This is conversion, the "passing," as the Bible calls it, "from
Death unto Life." Those who have stood by another's side at the solemn
hour of this dread possession have been conscious sometimes of an
experience which words are not allowed to utter--a something like the
sudden snapping of a chain, the waking from a dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] "Beginnings of Life." By H. C. Bastian, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.
Macmillan, vol. ii. p. 633.

[34] "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley. F.R.S., p. 239.

[35] _Nineteenth Century_, 1878, p. 507.

[36] This being the crucial point it may not be inappropriate to
supplement the quotations already given in the text with the
following:--

"We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf--the gulf of all
gulfs--that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface
as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the
eyes of men first looked into it--the mighty gulf between death and
life."--"As Regards Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., p.
42.

"The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the
living and the not-living."--Huxley, "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (new
Ed.). Art. "Biology."

"Whoever recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made
very recently to discover a decided support for the _generatio aequivoca_
in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic
world, will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so
utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all
our views of life."--Virchow: "The Freedom of Science in the Modern
State."

"All really scientific experience tells us that life can be produced
from a living antecedent only."--"The Unseen Universe," 6th Ed., p. 229.

[37] John iii.

[38] Rom. viii. 6.

[39] Rev. iii. 1.

[40] 1 Tim. v. 6.

[41] Eph. ii. 1, 5.

[42] 1 Cor. ii.