The average Christian materialist would stoutly deny, no doubt, that his belief in the reality of matter and his acceptance of the philosophy of material evolution rules God out of the universe. He would insist that God uses matter simply as a means of expression, of effectiveness upon the plane of present human sense; that God is ever in and working through material substance and natural law to will and to do of His good pleasure.
The incongruity of this association and interaction of Spirit and matter, life and death, has, however, always impressed itself upon candid thought, and, consciously or unconsciously, the identification of all the potentialities of life with the material factor has practically been consented to by the many. Indeed the glamor of the evolutionary idea of a definitely articulated series of life impulses and manifestations, from inert and formless stuff up to the most highly differentained expressions of intelligence, has seemed to make an irresistible appeal to the so-called scientific temperament. It is a point of view which not only accepts the possibility of "spontaneous generation," but it insists, as a recent writer (Percival Lowell, in The Century) has affirmed, "that whenever conditions for the existence of life occur, the lower forms of life inveitably come into existence." No less a person than John Burroughs recently said, in the columns of the Atlantic Monthly,—
I like to think of the old weather-worn globe as the mother of us all ... If the beginning of life on the globe was the introduction of no new principle, but only the result of a vastly more complex and intimate play and interaction of the old physico-chemical forces of the inorganic world, then the gulf that is supposed to separate the two worlds of living and non-living matter virtually disappears; the two worlds meet and fuse. We shall probably in time have to come to accept this view. It is in a line with the whole revelation of science, so far—the getting rid of the miraculous, the unknowable, the transcendental, and the enhancing of the potency and the mystery of things near at hand that we have always known in other forms. It is at first an unpalatable truth, like the discovery of the animal origin of man, or that consciousness and all our fine thoughts and aspirations are the result of the molecular action in the brain; ... Science is constantly bringing us back to earth and to the ground underfoot. Our dream of something far-off, supernatural, vanishes. ... We shall probably be brought, sooner or later, to accept another unpalatable theory, that of the physical origin of the soul, that it is not of celestial birth except as the celestial and terrestrial are one.
In a similar vein Bliss Carman has just said that everything we are and do is based on the physical, and that it ill becomes us to despise our origin.
The thought of the evolution of life from inorganic matter which pervades these confessions of faith, was abandoned by Mr. Huxley many years ago. He found that when a tincture of vegetable matter, such as hay, which had been subjected to a degree of heat that would certainly kill all animal or vegetable germs, was set aside in the open air, low forms of life speedily made their appearance in it. When, however, he performed the experiment in the pure air of the higher Alps, the decoction remained barren of life, thus providing that the germs of these rudimentary forms were communicated from the atmosphere of the lower levels. It is rather surprising that a thought which has thus been proven untenable by so eminent a scientist should be adopted even by these poetic lovers of "mother earth." It has been said that if bacteriology teaches anything, it is this, that "living things, even in their lowest forms, never come into existence except when derived from preceding life," and this denial of spontaneous generation has, strange to say, been emphasized recently by one who speaks from the physician's point of view. He says,—
It is for the reason that living germs always arise only from preceding living germs, that modern medicine cherishes the hope of eradicating infectious diseases, and this hope would speedily pass away if there were any question of the origin anew of the germs of disease.
Commenting upon this subject, an editorial writer in the Journal of the American Medical Association declares that any popularization of science which tends to weaken the conviction of the impossibility of the origin of life except from preceding life strikes directly at the modern scientific principles by which physicians are seeking to lessen human suffering! This is an interesting case of materialist vs. materialism which enthusiastic exponents of "the latent potentialities of matter" would do well to note.
In the presence of these contradictions of material sense, the clear and authoritative statement of Christian Science respecting life comes to one as a satisfying portion. Says our Leader, "The scientific fact that man and the universe are evolved from Spirit, and so are spiritual, is as fixed in divine Science as is the proof that mortals gain the sense of health only as they lose the sense of sin and disease" (Science and Health, p. 69). The view that something can come from nothing, that all change, development, and phenomena are latent in a cell; that a thing which is lifeless begets life, is diametrically opposed to one of the most fundamental laws of thought, namely, that every effect must have an adequate cause. This requirement of all sane and logical reasoning appeals with such irresistible force that it becomes quite impossible to think that anything can be evolved which has not been previously involved, whatever the source, and this makes it necessary for the materialist to conclude that a simple cell may embrace and contain all the history and actualities, the life and thought, of a Lincoln or a Gladstone!
In the light of Christian Science there is a wondrously inspiring sense in which "spontaneous generation' is true, and St. Paul hints at it in his remarkable address upon the Areopagus. The declaration of Christian Science that all being is the immediate and continuous expression of the divine activity; that there is no life, substance, or intelligence apart from God, omnipresent Spirit; that Mind compasses and sustains all its ideas, and establishes and maintains their every interrelation and action,—this presents a concept of being and its generation which gives the ground and explanation of the Christ-healing—the presence and supremacy of Life—again being demonstrated through Christian Science in fulfilment of our Lord's promise and command, and which discloses the significance and fitness of Mrs. Eddy's words, when she says, "Life is, always has been, and ever will be independent of matter." "Creation is ever appearing, and must ever continue to appear from the nature of its inexhaustible source." "Some time we shall learn how Spirit, the great architect, has created men and women in Science" (Science and Health, pp. 200, 507, 68).
Surely no one can fail to see the exaltation of thought which naturally attends this sense of life and its appearing. Instead of dwelling upon the assumed possibilities of inorganic matter which furnish the basis and beginning of the materialist's imaginings, one is ushered into the presence of an all-embracing Spirit, and contemplates the everharmonious and beneficent activities of an infinite intelligence, of which we cannot even think without gaining a new and quickening sense of the meaning of St. John's phrase, "Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."
