190 The Fundamentals The teaching and preaching of the day are largely per meated by a notion to the effect that science is in some un defined way supplying to a greater or less extent new founda tions for religious faith. We cannot, therefore, insist too strongly upon the vital difference (—for it is vital being a difference upon which life depends) between truth revealed by God through His Word, and truth discovered by the investi gations of man, and generally spoken of as “scientific truth. Truth thus obtained has no relation whatsoever to faith and eternal life; and the effort to substitute it for, or to oppose it to, the truth revealed in God’s Word as the basis of faith, must be ascribed to the activity of the “spirit of error. Many unspiritual teachers in these last days, and many superficial readers of Scripture, deem it incredible that salva tion, which is the beginning of the life of the risen Christ in the soul of a perishing man, should be wrought through an operation ’so apparently simple as that of receiving God s Word, through faith, into the heart. The clear declarations of God’s Word on this subject are indeed frequently ridiculed in pulpit utterances. But to such minds the germination of a seed by merely casting it into the ground would be equally incredible. These spiritually-blinded ones, wise in their own conceits, miss altogether the teaching of the Bible concerning the wonderful process of spiritual con ception and generation, which, in view of-the equally mys terious process of natural conception, should not be deemed “a thing incredible.” “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1 :20). The passage in 1 Peter 1 sets forth, moreover, the fact that spiritual generation through the Word of God conforms to the great biological law stated with such emphatic iteration in the first chapter of Genesis, namely, that the life imparted is the same in kind as that of its source, all the characteristics of the latter being reproduced in it. Emphasis is laid on the fact
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