"What goes on then in the animal kingdom is this--the bird-life seizes upon the bird-germ and builds it up into a bird, the image of itself. The reptile-life seizes upon another germinal speck, assimilates surrounding matter, and fashions it into a reptile. The reptile-life thus simply makes an incarnation of itself. The visible bird is simply an incarnation of the invisible bird-life. "Now we are nearing the point where the spiritual analogy appears. It is a very wonderful analogy, so wonderful that one almost hesitates to put it into words. Yet Nature is reverent; and it is her voice to which we listen. These lower phenomena of life, she says, are but an allegory. There is another kind of life of which science as yet has taken little cognizance. It obeys the same laws. It builds up an organism into its own form. It is the Christ-life. As the bird-life builds up a bird, the image of itself, so the Christ-Life builds up a Christ, the image of Himself, in the inward nature of man. When a man becomes a Christian the natural process is this: The living Christ enters into his soul. Development begins. The quickening life seizes upon the soul, assimilates surrounding elements, and begins to fashion it. According to the great law of conformity to type this fashioning takes a specific form. It is that of the Artist who fashions. And all through life this wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet perfectly definite process, goes on "until Christ be formed" in it. "The Christian life is not a vague effort after righteousness--an ill-defined pointless struggle for an ill-defined pointless end. Religion is no disheveled mass of aspiration, prayer, and faith. There is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in Biology. There is much mystery in Biology. We know all but nothing of life yet, nothing of development. There is the same mystery in the spiritual life. But the great lines are the same, as decided, as luminous; and the laws of natural and spiritual are the same as unerring, as simple. Will everything else in the natural world unfold its order, and yield to science more and more a vision of harmony, and religion, which should complement and perfect all, remain a chaos? From the standpoint of revelation no truth is more obscure than conformity to type. If science can furnish a companion phenomenon from an every-day process of the natural life, it may at least throw this most mystical doctrine of Christianity into thinkable form. Is there any fallacy in speaking of the embryology of the new life? Is the analogy invalid? Are there not vital processes in the spiritual as well as in the natural world? The bird being an incarnation of the bird-life, may not the Christian be a spiritual incarnation of the Christ-life? And is there not a real justification in the processes of the new birth for such a parallel? "Let us appeal to the record of these processes.