MAN'S wisdom and learning are incapable of furnishing a definition of life. The attempts of the wisest and most learned to furnish such a definition only serve to exhibit the futility of the attempt.

      Herbert Spencer, who has made the most ambitious attempt of modern times to explain the visible universe, gives this as the result of his best efforts to define life: "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations."

      This definition manifestly stands as much in need of explanation as that which it purports to explain. But it will serve at least to remind us that the wisdom of men is foolishness with God.

      Another eminent man of science defined life as "the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous."

      These modern definitions are scarcely an improvement upon that of Aristotle, who defined life as "the assemblage of the operations of nutrition, growth, and destruction." [18]

      What a marvellous thing is life, and how far it transcends the comprehension of man, since his best efforts to define it give results so ridiculously inadequate!

      The ignorance of scientific men on this subject is frankly confessed by Alfred Russel Wallace, who in one of his latest books--"Man's Place in the Universe"--says: "Most people give scientific men credit for much greater knowledge than they possess in these matters." And again: "As to the deeper problems of life, and growth, and reproduction, though our physiologists have learned an infinite amount of curious and instructive facts, they can give us no intelligible explanation of them."

      But, if none of us can say what life is, we can all distinguish between that which is living (even in the ordinary sense of the word) and that which is not living; and our best idea of the meaning of life is obtained by comparing that which has life (whether animal or vegetable) with that which has not life, as minerals, or any non-living matter. We know that, between the two, there is a great gulf, which only Divine power can span; for it is only the Living God who can impart life to that which is lifeless.

      We look then at the Written. Word of God to see if it manifests characteristics which are found only in living things, and to see if it exhibits, not merely the possession of life of the perishable [19] and corruptible sort with which we are so familiar by observation, and which is in each of us, but life of a different order--imperishable and incorruptible. [20]

[LITW 18-20]