Here in the Christian Sacrament, where the Christian says that the fullest justice is done to bread and wine in lifting them up to be a means of communion between God and man, science and philosophy, religion and art, may meet together.
For nearly two thousand years Christians have seen in 'this bread' of theirs matter impenetrated by spirit, and raised by it into another and a higher order. They have held to a doctrine of both in which neither was despised, or thought of as deceiving or unreal. Materialistic thought and theory, abstract spiritualism, all theories or doctrines that cut the world of experience in two with a rationalizing hatchet, have been powerless to loosen their hold. Matter informed and transformed by spirit; spirit pre-eminent over and including matter—these have been cardinal and inevitable implications in the sacramental worship of Christians. Cardinal and inevitable, too, is, in consequence, their view of the world as an affair of order superposed on order in a nature capable of being raised to the height of that which they call the supernatural, an earth that may become a new earth, a city of men that should rise to the noble state of a City of God.
We look back on the chemist's colloid that becomes, as protoplasm, no longer common colloid but one from which a world of living creatures has arisen. We see again a wonderful life informing and transforming matter, pre-eminent over it yet dependent on and manifesting through it. We see the chlorophyll of the plant raising chemical elements to a new order of being, and life in its onward march from order to order of manifesting consciousness, attaining at last man, creative in his spiritual freedom and dominance. We see that a Christian might point to man himself as the summing up of outward and visible signs and an inward and spiritual grace which science has made known, as reasonably as he may take bread as the central symbol of his worship. And he may tell us, or we may tell him, that these things are one—that there is everywhere 'continuity of process with the emergence of real differences' in a world that is 'sacramental' from its lowest to its highest order, from the speck of jelly to man. He and we both may see it as a world of outward and visible signs, each manifesting what the Christian names 'an inward and spiritual grace,' and we name—how do we name it? So far, only _life_, mysterious and mysteriously potent, communicating and communicated life.