a body
or chemical laboratory.

So far as is known, there is only one life--force. The difference
between lives is a question of the organism, the laboratory, which gives
embodiment to force.

The life that enables the wheels of a locomotive to go, the sap of a
tree to flow, the heart of an animal to beat and the brain of a man to
think is the same chemical potentiality differently organized.

During all historical time and over all the earth, under one name or
another, the whole world has kept days of rejoicing for life, especially
Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year and Easter.

Nothing is so wonderful as life and perhaps the greatest of its wonders
is that all of it is of the same kind.

Everything and every being is alive with the same life. The Thanksgiving
day sheaf of wheat, the Christmas day Son of Man and the Easter day Son
of God (if there are conscious, personal gods and they have sons) are
alive and their life is the same, the difference being wholly in the
form and degree, not at all in kind.

A proof of the oneness and sameness of all life, notwithstanding its
widely different forms and degrees, is the fact that a bar of iron, a
stick of wood, a piece of flesh and a section of brain respond alike to
the same electrical stimulus, and all may be poisoned or otherwise
killed so that they will make no response to it. Perhaps even a more
conclusive evidence is that the eggs (every form of both vegetable and
animal life develops from an egg) of some animals rather high in the one
tree of mundane life, which has a common root and a stump, but two
stems, the vegetable and the animal, can be mechanically fertilized by
chemical processes.

Even Sir Oliver Lodge, the most conspicuous among the comparatively few
men of science who hold to the theory that life comes to the earth as
vital entities of celestial origin and destination, makes this fatal
admission: "There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about
every vital action." On the theory of traditional Christianity there was
no physics, chemistry or mechanics connected with the vital actions
which originally brought the universe and all that therein was,
including the earth with its vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, into
existence.

Every representative of each form of life in these kingdoms (in the
vegetable: a grass blade, a wheat stalk, an oak tree; or in the animal:
an insect, a horse, a man) is a chemical laboratory for the production