Life in the Word 47 Professor Tyndall says: “Every attempt made in our day to generate life independent of antecedent life has utterly broken down.” Such has indeed been, and such must ever be, the result of all human attempts to start the flow of a stream of life, or to divert one which God has started, so as to change the form of manifestation which the Author and Giver of life has given to each species of living creatures. We wish the reader to understand that we rest nothing whatever upon the outcome of the foregoing scientific con- troversy, nor upon the above quoted (or any other) statements of human opinion however high their source. Faith has no foundation other than the Word of God. Men of science may be right or wrong in their deductions from the fragmentary information possessed by them. Gen- erally they are wrong, as is clearly enough shown by the fact that a large part of the work of each generation of men of science consists in overturning or modifying the theories of their predecessors. The foregoing is given as an illustration of the utter futility of setting up the deductions of the human reason against the assertions of the Word of God, and as a caution to the reader, if he be a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ, not to give the slightest credence to any state- ments made in the name of “science” or “scholarship” which call into question what is written in the inspired Scriptures. We may ask then, Is the Word of God a living Word in this particular sense? Does it have the mysterious power of imparting life; and if so, is the life it imparts of the same sort as its own ? Does it reproduce “after its kind” ? This brings up the great subject of spiritual conception and generation, concerning which the Scripture gives not a little information. Into this highly interesting but difficult subject we will not now enter. Even the beginning and maintenance of physical life in plants and animals (including man) are great and inscrutable mysteries. This is true in all stages of
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker