are to
discuss some of Drummond's problems, were we not?"

"Yes; I shall be glad to. Are you comfortable? Shall I move your
pillow?"

"I'm resting very easily, thank you. Just hand me the book. Drummond's
chapter on Biogenesis interests me very much. I cannot talk very
scientifically, Dorian, on these things, but I hope to talk
intelligently and from the large viewpoint of the gospel. Here is
a paragraph from my book which I have marked and called 'The Wall
Between.' I'm sure you will remember it. Let us read it again:

"'Let us first place," he read from the book, 'vividly in our
imagination the picture of the two great Kingdoms of Nature, the
inorganic and the organic, as these now stand in the light of the Law
of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there is no
Spontaneous Generation of Life? It is meant that the passage from the
mineral world is hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic
world is staked off from the living world by barriers which have never
yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of
environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor
any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the
attribute of life. Only by bending down into this dead world of some
living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of
vitality, without this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed
in the inorganic sphere forever. It is a very mysterious Law which
guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is
one thing in Nature more worth pondering for its strangeness it is the
spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the
living by the law of Biogenesis and denied forever the possibility of
resurrection within itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this
broad line in Nature, that Science has long sought to obliterate it.
Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern
persistency that the assaults upon this law for number and thoroughness
have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test.
Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical laws
may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for
inorganic. But of the point where they meet, of that living borderland
between the dead and the living, Science is silent. It is as if God had
placed everything in earth and in heaven in the hands of N