s is a
correspondence which at once satisfies the demands of Science and
Religion. In mere quantity it is different from every other
correspondence known. Setting aside everything else in Religion,
everything adventitious, local, and provisional; dissecting in to the
bone and marrow we find this--a correspondence which can never break
with an Environment which can never change. Here is a relation
established with Eternity. The passing years lay no limiting hand on it.
Corruption injures it not. It survives Death. It, and it only, will
stretch beyond the grave and be found inviolate--

"When the moon is old,
And the stars are cold,
And the books of the Judgment-day 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."[76]

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
e