"The distinction between them is the same as that between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. What is the difference between a crystal and an organism, a stone and a plant. They have much in common. Both are made of the same atoms. Both display the same properties of matter. Both are subject to the physical laws. Both may be very beautiful. But besides possessing all that the crystal has, the plant possesses something more--a mysterious something called life. This life is not something which existed in the crystal only in a less developed form. There is nothing at all like it in the crystal. There is nothing like the first beginning of it in the crystal, not a trace or symptom of it. This plant is tenanted by something new, an original and unique possession added over and above all the properties common to both. When from vegetable life we rise to animal life, here again we find something original and unique--unique at least as compared with the mineral. From animal life we ascend again to spiritual life. And here also is something new, something still more unique. He who lives the spiritual life has a distinct kind of life added to all the other phases of life which he manifests--a kind of life infinitely more distinct than is the active life of a plant from the inertia of a stone. The spiritual man is more distinct in point of fact than is the plant from the stone. This is the one possible comparison in nature, for it is the widest distinction in nature; but compared with the difference between the natural and the spiritual the gulf which divides the organic from the inorganic is a hair's breadth. The natural man belongs essentially to this present order of things. He is endowed simply with a high quality of the natural animal life. But it is life of so poor a quality that it is not life at all. He that hath not the Son hath not life; but he that hath the Son hath life--a new and distinct and supernatural endowment. He is not of this world. He is of the timeless state, of eternity. It doth not yet appear what he shall be.