servation by the senses; we can explore, investigate, experiment, but full early a point is reached at which further investigation would prove useless. Elementary substances, limited and few in number, take innumerable forms. But each of these forms is a mere exterior wrapper; each veils what we call life, and what life is no man can tell.

"Life! Who understands it? Who has seen it? It is like the goddess Isis, whose veil may never be lifted by mortal hand. We take life as a fact; we ascertain its beginning, development, end, but we cannot explain it."

So writes a serious author. But is he right in asserting that we ascertain its beginning? Not so, except that it begins with God, and that God is life eternal. We know very little about life. One thing we know; it is impossible to point to any satisfactory experimental proof that life can be developed save from demonstrable antecedent life; that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call vital have never yet been artificially brought together.* It is a settled conviction. that life in its essence is something beyond any

* " Winds of Doctrine: being an examination of the modern theories of Automatism and Evolution." By Charles Elam, M.D., pp. 78, 79, 94, 109.

combination of physical forces; in short, that life has no physical correlate. In vain have philosophers of a certain school endeavored to establish the proposition that the earliest organisms were the natural product of the interactions of ordinary inorganic matter and force. Neither observation, experiment, nor reason gives any testimony in favor of such a view; on the contrary, the conclusion is an irresistible one, that life is in all cases due either to antecedent life or to a power and force from without that is not identical nor correlated with the ordinary physical forces.

"Supposing," says Canon Mason, "that the whole fabric of inorganic matter, with its wonders of light and heat and electricity, with its planetary systems, with the beauties of water, air, and earth, were the result of an accidental play of atoms, yet life, so far as we can see, cannot be accounted for in the same way. It is as nearly certain as anything can be that the conditions of matter were at one time such-the solar system consisting of matter at a white heat-that no kind of organic life such as we are acquainted with was possible in it. Organic life, then, has had a beginning in the world even if matter and force have not. How did it begin? Experimental evidence cannot establish a negative, but the researches of men unprejudiced and competent confirm us in supposing that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation. Science knows of no life which had not a living parent,

and science teaches that once there were no living parents on earth to produce a life. Yet here life is. The chasm between the noblest form of inorganic being and the lowest form of organic-a crystal, for instance, and a cell of protoplasm-is so great that no connecting link can be found. So far as we see, no evolution works gradually up to life. It is a sudden, startling phenomenon, which uses matter and force for its own purposes, but which is not derived from them. Whence was the first life introduced into a world which had once been incapable of harboring it, and which seems forever incapable of producing it?"*

Beneath the form, then, is an inner, unseen principle which evades search and defies comprehension. It comes downward into these forms; it is never spontaneously generated; that only which. has life can give life. What it is, no one can tell us. The outspread heavens, the myriad orbs of night, the solar system, earth, dry land, seas, valley and hill, the mineral, floral, and animal kingdoms all keep the secret close. What and whence is life? Matter has form, shape, and extension; it is subject to quantitative and qualitative analysis, but it is "informed," indwelt, by something else invisible, immaterial, inexplicable, which no one can describe or explain. What is life? No one knows.

* "Faith of the Gospel," pp. 8, 9.

Whence is life? Let us hear the conclusion of a great student of nature. Charles Darwin says: "I infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one form into which life was first breathed by the Creator." If that inference as to the origin of life be just, we have all that we need for the point in hand. Creation is one vast Sacramental System; an endless and overwhelming variety of outward and visible forms or signs, quickened by an invisible and incomprehensible vital force. Life is in everything; in everything it is concealed; it comes not from any natural source; it is a gift of the Creator who alone hath life in Himself. What we hold to be true of the sacraments of the Gospel is, in fact, no more than what we trace everywhere throughout creation; and to object to our claim and declaration that, although visible and material in form, they contain and convey an inward and spiritual grace and power, is as unreasonable as to deny what we certainly know to be true of everything about us which hath the breath of life; of the creatures which have a material organism, and within it a quickening principle originally derived from some region outside the bounds of the natural universe.

II. A striking illustration of this universal arrangement of God's universe is seen in man. He is, emphatically, a sacrament, and a sacrament of a very wonderful order. He has a material. body, an animal soul, an immaterial and immortal spirit. His body is the sign; made of the same elements which, otherwise combined, form the brute, the plant, the rock; within this frame is a principle of animal life, which gives him his place with the other orders of created beings; there also reside the principle of intelligence, which lifts him to a higher plane, and the spark of divine fire which carries him almost up to the place of the angels, and makes him an heir of immortal life. What then is this creature but a sacrament? What is his existence but a sacramental existence? Eye, tongue, hand, look, speech, are agents apt to reveal what is going on within. Who has ever seen a man? What we come in contact with is an outward and visible sign; eye answers to eye, hand clasps hand, voices ask and answer questions: but where or what is the real, the invisible, being, who thinks and speaks and is and lives?

III. In a universe sacramental throughout stands