Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond.

  • Henry Drummond
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    431/456 (page 399)
    teristics are, relatively to any hypothetical higher Kingdom, necessarily remain unknown. That the Spiritual, in turn, may be the preparation for, and the prophecy of, something still higher is not im- possible. But the very conception of a Fourth Kingdom transcends us, and if it exist, the Spiritual organism, by the analogy, must remain at present wholly dead to it. The warrant for adding this Third Kingdom con- sists, as just stated, in the fact that there are organisms which from their peculiar origin, nature, and destiny cannot be fitly entered in either of the two Kingdoms now known to science. The Second Kingdom is proclaimed by the advent upon the stage of the First, of once-born organisms. The Third is ushered in by the appearance, among these once-born organisms, of forms of life which have been born again—ttvice-born organisms. The classi- fication, therefore, is based, from the scientific side on certain facts of embryology and on the Law of Biogenesis ; and from the theological side on cer- tain facts of experience and on the doctrine of Re- generation. To those who hold either to Biogenesis or to Regeneration, there is no escape from a Third Kingdom.1 Philosophical classifications in this direction (see for instance Godet s “ Old Testament Studies,”pp. 2-40), owing to theirneglect