of the invisible Bird-Life.

Now we are nearing the point where the spiritual analogy appears. It is
a very wonderful analogy, so wonderful that one almost hesitates to put
it into words. Yet Nature is reverent; and it is her voice to which we
listen. These lower phenomena of life, she says, are but an allegory.
There is another kind of Life of which Science as yet has taken little
cognizance. It obeys the same laws. It builds up an organism into its
own form. It is the Christ-Life. As the Bird-Life builds up a bird, the
image of itself, so the Christ-Life builds up a Christ, the image of
Himself, in the inward nature of man. When a man becomes a Christian the
natural process is this: The Living Christ enters into his soul.
Development begins. The quickening Life seizes upon the soul,
assimilates surrounding elements, and begins to fashion it. According to
the great Law of Conformity to Type this fashioning takes a specific
form. It is that of the Artist who fashions. And all through Life this
wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet perfectly definite process, goes on
"until Christ be formed" in it.

The Christian Life is not a vague effort after righteousness--an
ill-defined pointless struggle for an ill-defined pointless end.
Religion is no dishevelled mass of aspiration, prayer, and faith. There
is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in Biology.
There is much mystery in Biology. We know all but nothing of Life yet,
nothing of development. There is the same mystery in the spiritual Life.
But the great lines are the same, as decided, as luminous; and the laws
of natural and spiritual are the same, as unerring, as simple. Will
everything else in the natural world unfold its order, and yield to
Science more and more a vision of harmony, and Religion, which should
complement and perfect all, remain a chaos? From the standpoint of
Revelation no truth is more obscure than Conformity to Type. If Science
can furnish a companion phenomenon from an every-day process of the
natural life, it may at least throw this most mystical doctrine of
Christianity into thinkable form. Is there any fallacy in speaking of
the Embryology of the New Life? Is the analogy invalid? Are there not
vital processes in the Spiritual as well as in the Natural world? The
Bird being an incarnation of the Bird-Life, may not the Christian be a
spiritual incarnation of the Christ-Life? And is here not a real
justification in the processes of th