of Life. We cannot
get rid of that term. However clumsy, however provisional, however much
a mere cloak for ignorance, Science as yet is unable to dispense with
the idea of a Principle of Life. We must work with the word till we get
a better. Now that which determines the correspondence of the spiritual
organism is a Principle of Spiritual Life. It is a new and Divine
Possession. He that hath the Son hath Life; conversely, he that hath
Life hath the Son. And this indicates at once the quality and the
quantity of the correspondence which is to bridge the grave. He that
hath Life hath _the Son_. He possesses the Spirit of a Son. That spirit
is, so to speak, organized within him by the Son. It is the
manifestation of the new nature--of which more anon. The fact to note at
present is that this is not an organic correspondence, but a spiritual
correspondence. It comes not from generation, but from regeneration. The
relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is, in
theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the filial
correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal. This is
not only the real relation, but the only possible relation: "Neither
knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
will reveal Him." And this on purely natural grounds. It takes the
Divine to know the Divine--but in no more mysterious sense than it takes
the human to understand the human. The analogy, indeed, for the whole
field here has been finely expressed already by Paul: "What man," he
asks, "knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in
him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which
is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of
God."[75]

It were idle, such being the quality of the new relation, to add that
this also contains the guarantee of its eternity. Here at last is a
correspondence which will never cease. Its powers in bridging the grave
have been tried. The correspondence of the spiritual man possesses the
supernatural virtues of the Resurrection and the Life. It is known by
former experiment to have survived the "changes in the physical state of
the environment," and those "mechanical actions" and "variations of
available food," which Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us are "liable to stop
the processes going on in the organism." In short, thi