ly, we find an organizing principle at work among the
materials of the organic kingdom, performing a further miracle, but not
a different kind of miracle, producing organizations of a novel kind,
but not by a novel method. The second process, in fact, is simply what
an enlightened evolutionist would have expected from the first. It marks
the natural and legitimate progress of the development. And this in the
line of the true Evolution--not the _linear_ Evolution, which would look
for the development of the natural man through powers already inherent,
as if one were to look to Crystallization to accomplish the development
of the mineral into the plant--but that larger form of Evolution which
includes among its factors the double Law of Biogenesis and the immense
further truth that this involves.

What is further included in this complex correspondence we shall have
opportunity to illustrate afterward.[77] Meantime let it be noted on
what the Christian argument for Immortality really rests. It stands upon
the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical
Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that
Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said,
"that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly."
And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is
clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a
metaphorical meaning on the commonest word of the New Testament is to
violate every canon of interpretation, and at the same time to charge
the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an
unusual use of so exact a vehicle for expressing definite thought as the
Greek language, and that on the most momentous subject of which He ever
spoke to men. It is a canon of interpretation, according to Alford, that
"a figurative sense of words is never admissible except when required by
the context." The context, in most cases, is not only directly
unfavorable to a figurative meaning, but in innumerable instances in
Christ's teaching Life is broadly contrasted with Death. In the teaching
of the apostles, again, we find that, without exception, they accepted
the term in its simple literal sense. Reuss defines the apostolic belief
with his usual impartiality when--and the quotation is doubly pertinent
here--he discovers in the apostle's conception of Life,