of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there is no
Spontaneous Generation of Life? It is meant that the passage from the
mineral world is hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic
world is staked off from the living world by barriers which have never
yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of
environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor
any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the
attribute of life. Only by bending down into this dead world of some
living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of
vitality, without this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed
in the inorganic sphere forever. It is a very mysterious Law which
guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is
one thing in Nature more worth pondering for its strangeness it is the
spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the
living by the law of Biogenesis and denied forever the possibility of
resurrection within itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this
broad line in Nature, that Science has long sought to obliterate it.
Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern
persistency that the assaults upon this law for number and thoroughness
have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test.
Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical laws
may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for
inorganic. But of the point where they meet, of that living borderland
between the dead and the living, Science is silent. It is as if God had
placed everything in earth and in heaven in the hands of Nature, but
reserved a point at the genesis of Life for His direct appearing.'

"Drummond goes on to prove by analogy that the same law which makes such
a separation between the higher and the lower in the natural world holds
good in the spiritual realm, and he quotes such passages as this to