to nature and its Creator, may
reward even some of us."[152]

D.--PRESENT CONDITION OF THEORIES OF LIFE.

One of the most learned and ingenious essays on this subject recently
published[153] states on its first page that all the varieties of
opinion may be summed up under two heads:

"1. Those which require the addition to ordinary matter of an
immaterial or spiritual essence, substance, or power, general or
local, whose presence is the efficient cause of life; and,

"2. Those which attribute the phenomena of life solely to the mode of
combination of the ordinary material elements of which the organism is
composed, without the addition of any such immaterial essence, power,
or force."

It is quite true that physiologists have up to this time argued out
these two alternatives, and that at present the second is probably the
more prevalent. It is however also true that neither includes or can
possibly include the whole truth, and that enlightened theism may
enable us to hold both, or all that is true in either. Undoubtedly we
must hold that a higher spiritual power or Creator is necessary to the
existence of life; but then this is necessary also to the existence of
dead matter and force. So that if physiologists think proper to trace
the whole phenomena of life to material causes, they do not on that
account in any way invalidate the evidence for a spiritual Creator,
nor for a spiritual element in the higher nature of man. Yet so
inconceivably shallow is much of the biological reasoning of the day,
that it is quite common to find physiologists referring all life to
spontaneous and uncaused material agencies, because they have
concluded that the arrangements of matter and force are sufficient to
explain it; and, on the other hand, to find theistic writers accusing
physiology of materialism, if it finds the causes of vital phenomena
in material forces, as if God could be present only in those processes
which we can not understand.

What we really know as to the material basis of life may be summed up
in a few words. Chemically, life is based on compounds of the
albuminous group. These are highly complex in a molecular point of
view, and seem to be formed in nature only where certain structures,
those of the vegetable cell, exist under certain conditions. These
albuminous substances do not necessarily possess vital properties.
They may exist in a dead state just as other substances. Under certain
conditions, howeve