II.

"NATURAL AND SPIRITUAL."

"There are not two worlds, but one and the same, embracing all, even that which vulgar thought conceives as opposite,- Nature and Spirit.” SCHELLING.

THE popular religion is Manichean. It is so not only in its pneumatology, where it has the warrant of its sacred books, but also in its ontology, where it has no such warrant. It assumes, in the current antithesis of Nature and Spirit, a duality of which its scripture knows nothing.* The doctrine crept into the Church from an extra Christian source, and belongs to another system. A distinction is recognized by philosophy, ancient and modern, between soul and spirit. The soul is common to man with the brute; the spirit is that which distinguishes him from other animals. This distinction, in the hands of theologians, became oppugnance: a difference of degree became battle-array of hostile forces. Instead of "natural" and "supernatural," the two were conceived as natural and contranatural.

* St. Paul distinguishes between animal and spiritual, τὸ ψυχικόν and TÒ TVEVμIATIKÓV. Our version improperly renders the former term "natural.” Hence the popular dualism. There is nothing of this dualism in the doctrine of Christ, who so penetrated what we call Nature with his spiritual vision as to see only spirit there, and who was so domesticated in what we call the spiritual world, that to him it was as natural as earth and sky.

Nature was put in antagonism with spirit, that is, with God; and St. Augustine, who did more than any other to mould the anthropology of the Christian Church, and who never outgrew his Manichean antecedents, taught that all which is good in man is contrary to nature, and that all which is natural in man is Satanic; making the human a mere arena for the demonstration of hellish and divine powers.

So ingrained in the language of religion is this dualism, that the popular theology is ineradicably infected, the popular mind irrecoverably bewildered, by it. Writers in defence of Christianity declare it to be against the grain of human nature," and fancy that they exalt it by this declaration. What could infidel say more damaging to the cause of Christian truth?

As a classification of the facts of life whereby one class of phenomena and functions is distinguished from another, the antithesis of natural and spiritual, although inadequate, might pass as loose phraseology. But to make of the rhetorical antithesis an ontological antagonism, to say that nature and spirit are mutually oppugnant, is to put contradiction in the Godhead; or, what is the same thing, to affirm two Gods.

What we mean by nature, when we speak of it as an active power, is God. And "that which is natural," vegetable and animal, day and night, summer and winter, growth and decay, are divine operations, processes ordained and conducted by God. And, what we mean by spirit, is it not the same God? And "that which is spiritual,"— truth and goodness, conversion, grace,—are these not also divine operations, processes, acts? Are they not also of the very God who

made day and night, and the earth and the stars? Further than this we cannot go. We have no experience and no revelation which reaches behind the phenomena; no revelation other than that of the one Creator and Spirit. We only know that all phenomena have one origin at last; that the same all-present and allteeming Power works equally in the soul and in the sod, is manifest, however diversely, in the life of a saint and the life of a plant; that the God who makes grass to grow in the field makes love and goodness to spring in the heart; that the Father of spirits is the sparrow's Father too, and the Father of the lilies of the field; that the sovereign Will, which, in one of its aspects, we term the law of gravitation, in another is the law of duty which impels the Christian and the Christ.

Nature and spirit are not opposite, but one; related to each other as genus and species, or as parts of one whole; the same arch-power in different characters and functions. It matters little how we theorize about them, so long as we acknowledge in nature and spirit a common fountain and a radical affinity thence arising. We may call nature unconscious spirit, and spirit conscious nature; or we may regard them as parallel independent manifestations. However we may speculate, the essential fact remains. Both meet in one source; both reflect one image. All that is natural is spiritual "in its ascent and cause ;" all that is spiritual is natural "in its descent and being."

If for "natural" we substitute "material," we have, it might seem, a more legitimate antithesis. But, even then, the terms should be conceived as expressing different stages of being, not contrary powers. Matter

is nature at rest; spirit is nature in action. Throughout nature, there is a tendency and an effort to become spirit, a struggling-up into liberty and consciousness. From shapeless masses to the salient crystal, the beginning of intelligible form; to the growing plant, the beginning of organism; to the sentient animal, the first revelation of conscious soul; to rational man, the highest and last revelation of spirit;

the progress is still from

We say of the plant, it

stage to stage of natural life. lives. Previous to that, through all the stages of the mineral kingdom, -earths, metals, jewels, Nature had slept. But now, with the plant, she awakes from her torpor, and looks about her. From the dark bosom of insensate matter emerges a soul. Intelligence looks out from the full-blown flower; instinct shows itself in the natural adaptation of the seed to the soil. With the brute creation, nature attains a higher level, becomes more active and free. Deeper instincts, sensation, affection, begin to appear. Then finally, in man, the same nature appears as spirit: it becomes reflective, self-conscious, moral. The sense of obligation, aspiration, reverence, charity, faith, devotion, are its finished fruits.

In this progressive unfolding of itself from what we call matter to what we call spirit, nature does not cease to be nature as it rises and ripens. The flower is not less natural than the earth from which it springs; the animal, not less natural than the plant; and the perfect man with all his aspirations and his virtues, the prophet, the saint, is not less natural, but more so, than plant and brute; more natural because more developed and complete.

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And now, within the region of the human, what do we mean, what can we mean, by the "natural" and the spiritual" man? I say, the natural and the spiritual man are the same man in different manifestations and stages of growth. They differ from each other as the garden-plant differs from the same plant in its native state. We say of fruits and flowers which derive their character from the culture bestowed upon them and without that culture could not be what they are, — we say they are not natural but artificial products. In one sense, we are right: they are not original nature. And yet they are natural. For "nature is made better by no means, but nature makes that means. The very culture bestowed on flower and fruit is an operation of nature. In all that he does in the way of cultivation, man employs the aid of natural agents and laws. Whatever he produces, therefore, is a product of nature. So, too, the spiritual- our virtue, our religionis, in this sense, a natural product. As the plant is created a flower-and-fruit-bearing creature, so man is created a moral and religious creature: he has a capacity of moral and religious life, as the plant has a capacity of floral and pomal life. In either case, culture is required to bring out that capacity; and whatever that culture produces is natural. No measure of holiness, no work of grace, can exceed nature. Whatever height of goodness the saint may attain in his upward progress, he can arrive at nothing of which the germ and the promise were not laid in his constitution. He can arrive at nothing that is not natural.

This view does not overlook the immediate action of Deity on the soul. It does not overlook or deny what