Life, that a
true theology must begin with a Biology? Theology is the Science of God.
Why will men treat God as inorganic?

If this analogy is capable of being worked out, we should expect answers
to at least three questions.

First: What corresponds to the protoplasm in the spiritual sphere?

Second: What is the Life, the Hidden Artist who fashions it?

Third: What do we know of the process and the plan?

First: The Protoplasm.

We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to imagine for a
moment that the new creature was to be found out of nothing. _Ex nihilo
nihil_--nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and
indestructible; Nature and man can only form and transform. Hence when a
new animal is made, no new clay is made. Life merely enters into already
existing matter, assimilates more of the same sort and re-builds it. The
spiritual Artist works in the same way. He must have a peculiar kind of
protoplasm, a basis of life, and that must be already existing.

Now we find this in the materials of character with which the natural
man is previously provided. Mind and character, the will and the
affections, the moral nature--these form the bases of spiritual life. To
look in this direction for the protoplasm of the spiritual life is
consistent with all analogy. The lowest or mineral world mainly supplies
the material--and this is true even for insectivorous species--for the
vegetable kingdom. The vegetable supplies the material for the animal.
Next in turn, the animal furnishes material for the mental, and lastly
the mental for the spiritual. Each member of the series is complete only
when the steps below it are complete; the highest demands all. It is not
necessary for the immediate purpose to go so far into the psychology
either of the new creature or of the old as to define more clearly what
these moral bases are. It is enough to discover that in this womb the
new creature is to be born, fashioned out of the mental and moral parts,
substance, or essence of the natural man. The only thing to be insisted
upon is that in the natural man this mental and moral substance or basis
is spiritually lifeless. However active the intellectual or moral life
may be, from the point of view of this other Life it is dead. That which
is flesh is flesh. It wants, that is to say, the kind of Life which
constitutes the difference between the Christian and the
not-a-Christian. It has not yet been "born of the S