ce has given us is this: _A falling
out of correspondence with environment._ When, for example, a man loses
the sight of his eyes, his correspondence with the environing world is
curtailed. His life is limited in an important direction; he is less
living than he was before. If, in addition, he loses the senses of touch
and hearing, his correspondences are still further limited; he is
therefore still further dead. And when all possible correspondences have
ceased, when the nerves decline to respond to any stimulus, when the
lungs close their gates against the air, when the heart refuses to
correspond with the blood by so much as another beat, the insensate
corpse is wholly and forever dead. The soul, in like manner, which has
no correspondence with the spiritual environment is spiritually dead. It
may be that it never possessed the spiritual eye or the spiritual ear,
or a heart which throbbed in response to the love of God. If so, having
never lived, it cannot be said to have died. But not to have these
correspondences is to be in the state of Death. To the spiritual world,
to the Divine Environment, it is dead--as a stone which has never lived
is dead to the environment of the organic world.

Having already abundantly illustrated this use of the symbol Death, we
may proceed to deal with another class of expressions where the same
term is employed in an exactly opposite connection. It is a proof of the
radical nature of religion that a word so extreme should have to be used
again and again in Christian teaching, to define in different directions
the true spiritual relations of mankind. Hitherto we have concerned
ourselves with the condition of the natural man with regard to the
spiritual world. We have now to speak of the relations of the spiritual
man with regard to the natural world. Carrying with us the same
essential principle--want of correspondence--underlying the meaning of
Death, we shall find that the relation of the spiritual man to the
natural world, or at least to part of it, is to be that of Death.

When the natural man becomes the spiritual man, the great change is
described by Christ as a passing from Death unto Life. Before the
transition occurred, the practical difficulty was this, how to get into
correspondence with the new Environment? But no sooner is this
correspondence established than the problem is reversed. The question
now is, how to get out of correspondence with the old environment? The
momen