Yet once more--and this is a point of strange and frivolous dispute--this Life comes suddenly. This is the only way in which Life can come. Life cannot come gradually--health can, structure can, but not Life. A new theology has laughed at the Doctrine of Conversion. Sudden Conversion especially has been ridiculed as untrue to philosophy and impossible to human nature. We may not be concerned in buttressing any theology because it is old. But we find that this old theology is scientific. There may be cases--they are probably in the majority--where the moment of contact with the Living Spirit though sudden has been obscure. But the real moment and the conscious moment are two different things. Science pronounces nothing as to the conscious moment. If it did it would probably say that that was seldom the real moment--just as in the natural Life the conscious moment is not the real moment. The moment of birth in the natural world is not a conscious moment--we do not know we are born till long afterward. Yet there are men to whom the Origin of the New Life in time has been no difficulty. To Paul, for instance, Christ seems to have come at a definite period of time, the exact moment and second of which could have been known. And this is certainly, in theory at least, the normal Origin of Life, according to the principles of Biology. The line between the living and the dead is a sharp line. When the dead atoms of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, are seized upon by Life, the organism at first is very lowly. It possesses few functions. It has little beauty. Growth is the work of time. But Life is not. That comes in a moment. At one moment it was dead; the next it lived. This is conversion, the "passing," as the Bible calls it, "from Death unto Life." Those who have stood by another's side at the solemn hour of this dread possession have been conscious sometimes of an experience which words are not allowed to utter--a something like the sudden snapping of a chain, the waking from a dream. FOOTNOTES: [33] "Beginnings of Life." By H. C. Bastian, M.A., M.D., F.R.S. Macmillan, vol. ii. p. 633. [34] "Critiques and Addresses." T. H. Huxley. F.R.S., p. 239. [35] _Nineteenth Century_, 1878, p. 507. [36] This being the crucial point it may not be inappropriate to supplement the quotations already given in the text with the following:-- "We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf--the gulf of all gulfs--that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it--the mighty gulf between death and life."--"As Regards Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., p. 42. "The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living."--Huxley, "Encyclopædia Britannica" (new Ed.). Art. "Biology."