The antiquity of man from the point of view of religion : in answer to Mr. S. Laing's Modern science and modern thought / by F. Hugh Capron.

  • Capron, F. Hugh (Frederick Hugh), 1857-1955.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The antiquity of man from the point of view of religion : in answer to Mr. S. Laing's Modern science and modern thought / by F. Hugh Capron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Theology alike point to the opposite conclusion ? ‘ That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is bom of the spirit is spirit.’ All that we have endeavoured to show with reference to the origin of the spiritual life is that the Bible represents this to have been in its inception the product of creation. But when once it had come into existence (even in a single individual or pair of individuals) then immediately the problem changes altogether. However inexplicable the origin of life may be, its mode of reproduction is tolerably well understood. Here the only required factors are a life-containing eerm in contact with a suitable environment—a favourable soil, a genial atmosphere, with proper conditions of light, heat, and moisture. Given these, and Nature will do the rest without any appeal to the miraculous. And if so, may—or, rather, must— it not be that spiritual life is capable of being propa- gated by spiritual contact alone ? That this is the Bible doctrine can scarcely be disputed, ‘For in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel,’ ‘ Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds,’ ‘ My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,’ are all expressions which relate to the transmission not of physical, but of spiritual life, and they propound a doctrine which reappears under a slight change of metaphor in the well-known passage, ‘ I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the in- crease.’