early systems that animals
were often tabulated among the plants, and plants among the animals. "In
early attempts," says Herbert Spencer, "to arrange organic beings in
some systematic matter, we see at first a guidance by conspicuous and
simple characters, and a tendency toward arrangement in linear order. In
successively later attempts, we see more regard paid to combinations of
characters which are essential but often inconspicuous; and a gradual
abandonment of a linear arrangement for an arrangement in divergent
groups and re-divergent sub-groups."[96] Almost all the natural sciences
have already passed through these stages; and one or two which rested
entirely on external characters have all but ceased to exist--Conchology,
for example, which has yielded its place to Malacology. Following in the
wake of the other sciences, the classifications of Theology may have to
be remodeled in the same way. The popular classification, whatever its
merits from a practical point of view, is essentially a classification
based on Morphology. The whole tendency of science now is to include
along with morphological considerations the profounder generalizations
of Physiology and Embryology. And the contribution of the latter science
especially has been found so important that biology henceforth must look
for its classification largely to Embryological characters.

But apart from the demand of modern scientific culture it is palpably
foreign to Christianity, not merely as a Philosophy but as a Biology, to
classify men only in terms of the former. And it is somewhat remarkable
that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments seem to have
recognized the deeper basis. The favorite classification of the Old
Testament was into "the nations which knew God" and "the nations which
knew not God"--a distinction which we have formerly seen to be, at
bottom, biological. In the New Testament again the ethical characters
are more prominent, but the cardinal distinctions based on regeneration,
if not always actually referred to, are throughout kept in view, both in
the sayings of Christ and in the Epistles.

What then is the deeper distinction drawn by Christianity? What is the
essential difference between the Christian and the not-a-Christian,
between the spiritual beauty and the moral beauty? It is the distinction
between the Organic and the Inorganic. Moral beauty is the product of
the natural man, spiritual beauty of the spiritual man. And t