with the properties of vitality, without this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere forever.  It is a very mysterious Law which guards in this way the portals of the living world.  And if there is one thing in Nature more worth pondering for its strangeness it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the law of Biogenesis and denied forever the possibility of resurrection within itself.  So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in Nature, that Science has long sought to obliterate it.  Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern persistency that the assaults upon this law for number and thoroughness have been unparalleled.  But, as we have seen, it has stood the test.  Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two.  The physical laws may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for inorganic.  But of the point where they meet, of that living borderland between the dead and the living, Science is silent.  It is as if God had placed everything in earth and in heaven in the hands of Nature, but reserved a point at the genesis of Life for His direct appearing.’

“Drummond goes on to prove by analogy that the same law which makes such a separation between the higher and the lower in the natural world holds good in the spiritual realm, and he quotes such passages as this to substantiate his argument:  ’Except a man is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God’.  Man must be born from above.  ’The passage from the natural world to the spiritual world is hermetically sealed on the natural side.’ that is, man cannot by any means make his own unaided way from the lower world to the higher.  ’No mental energy, no evolution, no moral effort, no evolution of character, no progress of civilization’ can alone lift life from the lower to the higher.  Further, the lower can know very little about the higher, for ’the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’.  All of which means, I take it, that the higher must reach down to the lower and lift it up.  Advancement in any line of progress is made possible by some directing power either seen or unseen.  A man cannot simply grow better and better until in his own right he enters the kingdom of God’.”

“But, Uncle Zed, are we not taught that we must work out our own salvation?” asked Dorian.  “That is also scriptural.”

“Yes; but wait; I shall come to that later.  Let us go on with our reasoning and see how this law which Drummond points out—­how it fits into the larger scheme of things as revealed to us Latter-day Saints.  You remember some time ago in our talk on the law of eternal progress we established the truth that there always have been intelligences evolving from lower to higher life, which in the eternity of the past would inevitably lead to the perfection of