spontaneous liberty were not broken by some resisting object, if it were not awakened by opposition to the fact that it has a possession to lose.

That opposition comes to it in its second and higher stage of development. If the first may be called its period of spontaneity, the second may be best described as its period of non-spontaneity. In its first age it was so unimpeded that it was unconscious of its own freedom, and therefore unable to value its own possession. In its second age it finds itself impeded on every hand; clouds and darkness are round about it. It awakes to the fact of its freedom only by the sense of its loss; and the days of childhood, which in their passage were unobserved, are in their retrospect that paradise from which the cares and sorrows of the wilderness have for ever expelled it. This is the period in which the life of man begins to experience an absence of perfect harmony with its environment, and begins to enter on those efforts at readjustment which make the greater part of human existence a life of labour and of struggle.

But there is a third stage of the natural life— a stage which, indeed, from the side of nature, is never perfectly realised, but to which every organism in nature is partially tending. If the first was the period of spontaneity, and the second the period in which the sense of spontaneity was broken by struggle, the third is that golden time

in which the struggle itself is vanquished and the life returns once more to more than its pristine rest. It returns to a rest which is no longer a mere state of spontaneity, but a state of conscious possession, in which the life becomes aware of its peace by the very fact of its cessation from war. This final stage of natural existence is the stage in which the vital principle begins to realise somewhat of the joy of being in harmony with its environment. If there were not even in the natural life a partial realisation of this experience, the order of natural evolution would have been arrested long ago. The fact that that order has not been arrested, the fact that life has still continued to triumph over death, is alone a convincing proof that in some region of its being, the organism has found a point of harmony with the environment in which it dwells, that even in the present system of things there does exist a certain form of rest.

Such, then, are the three successive stages which life exhibits in its natural and normal development. St Paul means to suggest that the new Spirit brought into the world by Christianity has condescended to adopt the old line of evolution, has elected to follow that law of successive stages which has been the order exhibited by life in general. Accordingly, we must be prepared to find that the law of the Spirit of life is just the old familiar law of all vital, mental, and moral evolu

tion the law by which the organism proceeds from unconscious liberty to conscious limitation, and from conscious limitation to realised liberty. It may seem a strange thing, even an incongruous thing, that in a work which seeks to derive its materials from the field of science, we should introduce a topic usually deemed so transcendental as that called in evangelical theology the work of the Spirit. We can only answer, it is because the law of the Spirit of life professes to be the law of the spirit of all life. It is because the new life, claiming as it does to come from above, has claimed with not less earnestness to have entered into union with the common forms of human evolution and with the prevailing order of human development. We only take up the work of the Spirit in that point where the work of the Spirit professes to touch the line of natural evolution, and to grow from less to more in the order prescribed by that line. All we have here to do is to investigate and to interpret the facts of the Christian consciousness. Even the materialist cannot deny that these are facts. The science of the positivist may and will dispute the account given of their origin, and the explanation offered of their existence in the human mind; but that they do exist in the human mind, and exist as forms of the most potent energy, not even the science of the positivist can deny. Let us then endeavour briefly to collect, arrange, and interpret

these facts of the Christian consciousness, and to see how the law of the Spirit of life describes in its progress the order of universal vital being.

The first stage in the evolution of the Spirit of life is portrayed in these words of St John's Gospel: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." The initial work of the Spirit is here compared to the natural force of the wind. The idea evidently is, that the wind begins to blow before its blowing becomes manifest to the ear. When we first hear the sound we cannot thereby determine whence it has come, because, in point of fact, it has had an existence and a movement previous to the time when the sound first reached our ear. When the wind begins to whistle amongst the trees, we are accustomed to say that it is rising; it would, in truth, be more correct to say that it has risen. What we hear is not its beginning, but only its manifestations; the stage which precedes its manifestation lies behind our consciousness, and therefore the sound does not enable us to tell the moment or the place of its origin: "thou canst not tell whence it cometh." The work of the Spirit is said to stand in an exactly similar relation to the human soul. A man is sometimes asked when the influence of the new life began to act upon him,

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and sometimes he puts his hand upon a definite place and hour, and declares that its beginning was there. In truth, what he means is simply this, that its earliest manifestation was there—that it was there he first heard the sound of the wind. No man can be present at his own birth. In every sphere of life-physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual- the act of birth lies behind the consciousness. It has been asked if a being can live without knowing that it lives. In the first stage of its existence every being not only can, but actually does. Sensation must follow outward impression. The pain of a blow is not contemporaneous with the blow; it succeeds to it. The sensation of existence in general observes the the same rule; we live before we recognise the fact of our being.

The change called the second birth demands, of course, a conscious preparation in the old nature; otherwise there could be no responsibility. The old nature is not in itself the antithesis of the new life; it is a force, and all forces are manifestations of the one primal Force. The antithesis of the new life is not the human constitution, but its disintegration or corruption; and it has never been contended that this disintegration or corruption eradicated the germ of man's primitive being. It is through the germ of his primitive being that man is able to become receptive of a life which