? On this point I may quote two leading
men of science. Tyndall says: "I affirm that no shred of trustworthy
experimental testimony exists, to prove that life in our day has ever
appeared independently of antecedent life"; and Huxley says: "The
doctrine of biogenesis, or life only from life, is victorious along the
whole line at the present time." Such is the testimony of modern science
to the old maxim "Omne vivum exvivo." "All life proceeds from antecedent
life." Think it out for yourself and you will see that it could not
possibly be otherwise.

Whatever may be our theory of the origin of life on the physical plane,
whether we regard it as commencing in a vivified slime at the bottom of
the sea, which we call protoplasm, or in any other way, the question of
how life got there still remains unanswered. The protoplasm being
material substance, must have its origin like all other material
substances, in the undifferentiated etheric Universal Substance, no
particle of which has any power of operating upon any other particle
until some initial vibration starts the movement; so that, on any theory
whatever, we are always brought back to the same question: What started
the condensation of the ether into the beginnings of a world-system? So
whether we consider the life which characterizes organized matter, or
the energy which characterizes inorganic matter, we cannot avoid the
conclusion, that both must have their source in some Original Power to
which we can assign no antecedent. This is the conclusion which has been
reached by all philosophic and religious systems that have really tried
to get at the root of the matter, simply because it is impossible to
form any other conception.

This Living Power is what we mean when we speak of the All-Originating
Spirit. The existence of this Spirit is not a theological invention, but
a logical and scientific ultimate, without predicating which, nothing
else can be accounted for. The word "Spirit" comes from the Latin
"spiro" "I breathe," and so means "The Breath," as in Job xxxiii,
4,--"The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath
given me life"; and again in Ps. xxxiii, 6--"By the word of the Lord
were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his
mouth."

In the opening chapter of Genesis, we are told that "the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters." The words rendered "the Spirit of
God" are, in the original Hebrew "rouah AEloh