the wild pear, or a beautiful double tea rose upon the wild rose, and the former will yield
luscious fruit and the latter magnificent flowers.
This miracle of grafting has always been a wonder to thinking men. And it is a wonder.
The trunk to be grafted is absolutely wild; with its wild roots it sucks the saps and forces
them into its wild cells. But that little graft has the wonderful power of converting the sap
and vital forces into something good, causing that wild trunk to bear noble fruit and rich
flowers. It is true the wild trunk vigorously resists the reformation of its nature by its wild
shoots below the graft, and if successful its wild nature will forcibly assert itself and prevent
the sap from passing through the bud. But by keeping down those wild shoots the sap can
be forced to the bud with excellent results. Forcing down the wild trunk, the graft will
gradually reach almost to the roots, and we nearly forget that the tree was ever wild.
This clearly represents regeneration so far as this divine mystery can be represented
objectively. For in regeneration something is planted in man which by nature he lacks. The
fall did not merely remove him from the sphere of divine righteousness, into which regen-
eration brings him back, but regeneration effects a radical modification in man as man,
312creating a difference between him and the unregenerate so great that finally it leads to direct
opposites.
To say that between the regenerate and the unregenerate there is no difference is equi-
valent to a denial of the work of the Holy Spirit. Generally, however, no difference is noticed
at first, no more than in the grafted tree. Twins lie in the same cradle; one regenerated, the
other not, but we can not see the slightest difference between the two. The former may even
have a worse temper than the latter. They are exactly alike. Both spring from the same wild
trunk. Dissecting knife nor microscope could detect the least difference; for that which God
has wrought in the favored child is wholly spiritual and invisible, discernible to God alone.
This fact must be confessed definitely and emphatically, in opposition to those who say
that the seed of regeneration is material. This error occupies the same ground as the
Manichean heresy in the matter of sin. The latter makes sin a microbe; and this makes the
seed of regeneration a sort of perceptible germ of life and holiness. And this falsifies the
truth against which, among others, Dr. Böhl has earnestly protested.
The seed of regeneration is intangible, invisible, purely spiritual. It does not create two
men in one being, but before and after regeneration there is but one being, one ego, one
personality. Not an old and a new man, but one man—viz., the old man before regeneration,
and the new man after it—who is created after God in perfect righteousness and holiness.
For that which is born of God can not sin. His seed remaineth in him. “Old things are passed
away, behold, all things are become new.” (2 Cor. v. 17)
Yet the nature of the ego or personality is truly changed, and in such a way that, putting
on the new nature in principle, he still continues to work through the oldnature. The grafted
tree is not two trees, but one. Before the grafting it was a wild rose, after it a cultivated one.
XXII. The Work of Regeneration.