rm
and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially,
where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so ill
defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the atmosphere
as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life.
Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.

July 9th. What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves.
No man can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can
choose his own Environment. His relation to it, however largely
determined by Heredity in the first instance, is always open to
alteration. And so great is his control over Environment and so radical
its influence over him, that he can so direct it as either to undo,
modify, perpetuate, or intensify the earlier hereditary influences within
certain limits. Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.

July 10th. One might show how the moral man is acted upon and changed
continuously by the influences, secret and open, of his surroundings, by
the tone of society, by the company he keeps, by his occupation, by the
books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short, that constitutes the
habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little world of his daily
choice. Or one might go deeper still and prove how the spiritual life
also is modified from outside sources--its health or disease, its growth
or decay, all its changes for better or for worse being determined by the
varying and successive circumstances in which the religious habits are
cultivated. Natural Law, Environment, p. 260.

July 11th. In the spiritual world . . . he will be wise who courts
acquaintance with the most ordinary and transparent facts of Nature; and
in laying the foundations for a religious life he will make no unworthy
beginning who carries with him an impressive sense of so obvious a truth
as that without Environment there can be no life. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 264.

July 12th. There is in the spiritual organism a principle of life; but
that is not self-existent. It requires a second factor, a something in
which to live and move and have its being, an Environment. Without this
it cannot live or move or have any being. Without Environment the soul is
as the carbon without the oxygen, as the fish without the water, as the
animal frame without the extrinsic conditions of vitality. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 264.

July 13th. What is the Spiritual Environment? It is God. Without this,
therefore, there