e. Both processes go steadily on from year to year apart
from himself and all but in spite of himself. One would never think of
_telling_ a boy to grow. A doctor has no prescription for growth. He can
tell me how growth may be stunted or impaired, but the process itself is
recognized as beyond control--one of the few, and therefore very
significant, things which Nature keeps in her own hands. No physician of
souls, in like manner, has any prescription for spiritual growth. It is
the question he is most often asked and most often answers wrongly. He
may prescribe more earnestness, more prayer, more self-denial, or more
Christian work. These are prescriptions for something, but not for
growth. Not that they may not encourage growth; but the soul grows as
the lily grows, without trying, without fretting, without ever thinking.
Manuals of devotion, with complicated rules for getting on in the
Christian life, would do well sometimes to return to the simplicity of
nature; and earnest souls who are attempting sanctification by struggle
instead of sanctification by faith might be spared much humiliation by
learning the botany of the Sermon on the Mount. There _can_ indeed be no
other principle of growth than this. It is a vital act. And to try to
_make_ a thing grow is as absurd as to help the tide to come in or the
sun rise.

Another argument for the spontaneousness of growth is universal
experience. A boy not only grows without trying, but he cannot grow if
he tries. No man by taking thought has ever added a cubit to his
stature; nor has any man by mere working at his soul ever approached
nearer to the stature of the Lord Jesus. The stature of the Lord Jesus
was not itself reached by work, and he who thinks to approach its
mystical height by anxious effort is really receding from it. Christ's
life unfolded itself from a divine germ, planted centrally in His
nature, which grew as naturally as a flower from a bud. This flower may
be imitated; but one can always tell an artificial flower. The human
form may be copied in wax, yet somehow one never fails to detect the
difference. And this precisely is the difference between a native growth
of Christian principle and the moral copy of it. The one is natural, the
other mechanical. The one is a growth, the other an accretion. Now this,
according to modern biology, is the fundamental distinction between the
living and the not living, between an organism and a crystal. The living
organ