unfold."

The misgiving which will creep sometimes over the brightest faith has
already received its expression and its rebuke: "Who shall separate us
from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution,
or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" Shall these "changes in
the physical state of the environment" which threaten death to the
natural man destroy the spiritual? Shall death, or life, or angels, or
principalities, or powers, arrest or tamper with his eternal
correspondences? "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord." [1]

[1] Rom. viii. 35-39.

It may seem an objection to some that the "perfect correspondence"
should come to man in so extraordinary a way. The earlier stages in the
doctrine are promising enough ; they are entirely in line with Nature.
And if Nature had also furnished the "perfect correspondence" demanded
for an Eternal Life the position might be unassailable. But this sudden
reference to a something outside the natural Environment destroys the
continuity, and discovers a permanent weakness in the whole theory?

To which there is a twofold reply. In the first place, to go outside
what we call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the
natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another
large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it,
is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral
world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed
either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that
from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was _supernatural_.
Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where one stands.
Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man. When
a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated to the organic
kingdom, no tresspass against Nature is committed. It merely enters a
larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it, but which now
is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is seized upon by
the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done to natural
law. It is another