life. Only by the 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. The physical laws
may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for the
development of the organic. But of the point where they meet,--of that
strange border-land between the dead and the living,--science is silent.
It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands
of nature, but had reserved a point at the genesis of life for His
direct appearing."[6]

[Footnote 6: Henry Drummond, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World,"
Chapter I.]

It would be superfluous to emphasize further this great outstanding fact
that the not-living cannot become the living by any of the processes
which we call natural; and it would be presumptuous to attempt to
emulate these eloquent words by seeking to emphasize the completeness
with which this great Law of Biogenesis confirms the truth of a real
Creation; for the supreme grandeur and importance of this law could be
only obscured by so doing.


II