stant.

What now, let us ask specifically, distinguishes a Christian man from a
non-Christian man? Is it that he has certain mental characteristics not
possessed by the other? Is it that certain faculties have been trained
in him, that morality assumes special and higher manifestations, and
character a nobler form? Is the Christian merely an ordinary man who
happens from birth to have been surrounded with a peculiar set of ideas?
Is his religion merely that peculiar quality of the moral life defined
by Mr. Matthew Arnold as "morality touched by emotion?" And does the
possession of a high ideal, benevolent sympathies, a reverent spirit,
and a favorable environment account for what men call his Spiritual
Life?

The distinction between them is the same as that between the Organic and
the Inorganic, the living and the dead. What is the difference between a
crystal and an organism, a stone and a plant? They have much in common.
Both are made of the same atoms. Both display the same properties of
matter. Both are subject to the Physical Laws. Both may be very
beautiful. But besides possessing all that the crystal has, the plant
possesses something more--a mysterious something called Life. This Life
is not something which existed in the crystal only in a less developed
form. There is nothing at all like it in the crystal. There is nothing
like the first beginning of it in the crystal, not a trace or symptom of
it. This plant is tenanted by something new, an original and unique
possession added over and above all the properties common to both. When
from vegetable Life we rise to animal Life, here again we find something
original and unique--unique at least as compared with the mineral. From
animal Life we ascend again to Spiritual Life. And here also is
something new, something still more unique. He who lives the Spiritual
Life has a distinct kind of Life added to all the other phases of Life
which he manifests--a kind of Life infinitely more distinct than is the
active Life of a plant from the inertia of a stone. The Spiritual man is
more distinct in point of fact than is the plant from the stone. This is
the one possible comparison in Nature, for it is the widest distinction
in Nature; but compared with the difference between the Natural and the
Spiritual the gulf which divides the organic from the inorganic is a
hair's-breadth. The natural man belongs essentially to this present
order of things. He is endowed simply with a