32 Vital and Spiritual Development. CHAP. 



acknowledge that some among us prove the attain- 

 ableness of this ideal by attaining it that there 

 are at least some men, and many women, who serve 

 God and walk in His light from the cradle to the 

 grave without any period of alienation from Him. 



The following is a summary of the conclusions to 

 which we have reached in the foregoing and the 

 present chapters : 



Man, in his merely natural and unregenerate 

 state, has nevertheless spiritual faculties, to which, 

 in the regenerate, the Holy Spirit gives direction 

 and development ; and the most appropriate natural 

 symbol of regeneration is not the vitalisation of dead 

 matter, but the action of Creative Intelligence in 

 guiding vital evolution. As in vital evolution an 

 organ becomes adapted to a new function, and an 

 organism to new surroundings, so in spiritual re- 

 generation the heart and mind are set on new 

 objects, and become adapted to the spiritual world. 



This view of the nature of regeneration makes 

 intelligible and conceivable what is, moreover, a 

 fact of experience that it should be possible to 

 walk from the cradle to the grave, not indeed alto- 

 gether without sin, but without any period of 

 alienation from God, and with the heavenly life 

 developing along with the earthly, as it did in Christ, 

 from the first. The school of religious thought 

 which Professor Drummond so ably represents, by 

 habitually using the word Conversion instead of 



