is to find a new Life. To live is to correspond, and to correspond is to
live. So much is true in Science. But it is also true in Religion. And it
is of great importance to observe that to Religion also the conception of
Life is a correspondence. No truth of Christianity has been more
ignorantly or wilfully travestied than the doctrine of Immortality. The
popular idea, in spite of a hundred protests, is that Eternal Life is to
live forever. . . . We are told that Life Eternal is not to live. This is
Life Eternal--TO KNOW. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 216.
June 7th. From time to time the taunt is thrown at Religion, not unseldom
from lips which Science ought to have taught more caution, that the
Future Life of Christianity is simply a prolonged existence, an eternal
monotony, a blind and indefinite continuance of being. The Bible never
could commit itself to any such empty platitude; nor could Christianity
ever offer to the world a hope so colourless. Not that Eternal Life has
nothing to do with everlastingness. That is part of the conception. And
it is this aspect of the question that first arrests us in the field of
Science. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 216.
June 8th. Science speaks to us indeed of much more than numbers of years.
It defines degrees of Life. It explains a widening Environment. It
unfolds the relation between a widening Environment and increasing
complexity in organisms. And if it has no absolute contribution to the
content of Religion, its analogies are not limited to a point. It yields
to Immortality, and this is the most that Science can do in any case, the
broad framework for a doctrine. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 217.
June 9th. To correspond with the God of Science, the Eternal Unknowable,
would be everlasting existence; to correspond with "the true God and
Jesus Christ," is Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone
makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief
span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in
sorrow. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 220.
June 10th. To Christianity, "he that hath the Son of God hath Life, and
he that hath not the Son hath not Life." This, as we take it, defines the
correspondence which is to bridge the grave. This is the clue to the
nature of the Life that lies at the back of the spiritual organism. And
this is the true solution of the mystery of Eternal Life. Natural Law,
Eternal Life, p. 227.
June 11th. The relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is,
in theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the
filial correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 229.
June 12th. It takes the Divine to know the Divine--but in no more
mysterious sense than it takes the human to understand the human. The
analogy, indeed, for the whole field here has been finely expressed
already by Paul: "What man," he asks, "knoweth the things of a man, save
the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the
world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God."--I. Cor. ii. 11, 12. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 229.
June 13th. To go outside what we call Nature is not to go outside
Environment. Nature, the natural Environment, is only a part of
Environment. There is another large part, which, though some profess to
have no correspondence with it, is not on that account unreal, or even
unnatural. The mental and moral world is unknown to the plant. But it is
real. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 232.
June 14th. Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where
one stands. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to
the man. When a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated
to the organic kingdom, no trespass against Nature is committed. It
merely enters a larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it,
but which now is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is
seized upon by the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done
to natural law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing
into the organic. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 232.
June 15th. Correspondence in any case is the gift of Environment. The
natural Environment gives men their natural faculties; the spiritual
affords them their spiritual faculties. It is natural for the spiritual
Environment to supply the spiritual faculties; it would be quite
unnatural for the natural Environment to do it. The natural law of
Bio-genesis forbids it; the moral fact that the finite cannot comprehend
the Infinite is against it; the spiritual principle that flesh and blood,
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God renders it absurd. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 233.
June 16th. Organisms are not added to by accretion, as in the case of
minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the
spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized
in the protoplasm of the body. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 233.
June 17th. It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian
teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am
come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more
abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and
Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 235.
June 18th. The effort to detect the living Spirit must be at least as
idle as the attempt to subject protoplasm to microscopic examination in
the hope of discovering Life. We are warned, also, not to expect too
much. "Thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." Natural
Law, Eternal Life, p. 237.
June 19th. Many men would be religious if they knew where to begin; many
would be more religious if they were sure where it would end. It is not
indifference that keeps some men from God, but ignorance. "Good Master,
what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" is still the deepest question of
the age. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 237.
June 20th. The voice of God and the voice of Nature. I cannot be wrong if
I listen to them. Sometimes, when uncertain of a voice from its very
loudness, we catch the missing syllable in the echo. In God and Nature we
have Voice and Echo. When I hear both, I am assured. My sense of hearing
does not betray me twice. I recognize the Voice in the Echo, the Echo
makes me certain of the Voice; I listen and I know. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 238.
June 21st. The soul is a living organism. And for any question as
to the soul's Life we must appeal to Life-science. And what does the
Life-science teach? That if I am to inherit Eternal Life, I must
cultivate a correspondence with the Eternal. Natural Law, Eternal Life,
p. 239.
June 22d. All knowledge lies in Environment. When I want to know about
minerals I go to minerals. When I want to know about flowers I go to
flowers. And they tell me. In their own way they speak to me, each in its
own way, and each for itself--not the mineral for the flower, which is
impossible, nor the flower for the mineral, which is also impossible. So
if I want to know about Man, I go to his part of the Environment. And he
tells me about himself, not as the plant or the mineral, for he is
neither, but in his own way. And if I want to know about God, I go to His
part of the Environment. And He tells me about Himself, not as a Man, for
He is not Man, but in His own way. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 239.
June 23d. Just as naturally as the flower and the mineral and the Man,
each in their own way, tell me about themselves, He tells me about
Himself. He very strangely condescends indeed in making things plain to
me, actually assuming for a time the Form of a Man that I at my poor
level may better see Him. This is my opportunity to know Him. This
incarnation is God making Himself accessible to human thought--God
opening to Man the possibility of correspondence through Jesus Christ.
Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 240.
June 24th. Having opened correspondence with the Eternal Environment, the
subsequent stages are in the line of all other normal development. We
have but to continue, to deepen, to extend, and to enrich the
correspondence that has been begun. And we shall soon find to our
surprise that this is accompanied by another and parallel process. The
action is not all upon our side. The Environment also will be found to
correspond. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 241.
June 25th. Let us look for the influence of Environment on the spiritual
nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching out his
eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him, shall he
not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he not become
holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall he miss
becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail to be
taught of God? Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 242.
June 26th. Growth in grace is sometimes described as a strange, mystical,
and unintelligible process. It is mystical, but neither strange nor
unintelligible. It proceeds according to Natural Law, and the leading
factor in sanctification is Influence of Environment. Natural Law,
Eternal Life, p. 242.
June 27th. Will the evolutionist who admits the regeneration of the frog
under the modifying influence of a continued correspondence with a new
environment, care to question the possibility of the soul acquiring such
a faculty as that of Prayer, the marvellous breathing-function of the new
creature, when in contact with the atmosphere of a besetting God? Is the
change from the earthly to the heavenly more mysterious than the change
from the aquatic to the terrestrial mode of life? Is Evolution to stop
with the organic? If it be objected that it has taken ages to perfect the
function in the batrachian, the reply is, that it will take ages to
perfect the function in the Christian. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 244.
June 28th. We have indeed spoken of the spiritual correspondence as
already perfect--but it is perfect only as the bud is perfect. "It doth
not yet appear what it shall be," any more than it appeared a million
years ago what the evolving batrachian would be. Natural Law, Eternal
Life, p. 244.
June 29th. In a sense, all that belongs to Time belongs also to Eternity;
but these lower correspondences are in their nature unfitted for an
Eternal Life. Even if they were perfect in their relation to their
Environment, they would still not be Eternal. . . . An Eternal Life
demands an Eternal Environment. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 245.
June 30th. The final preparation . . . for the inheriting of Eternal Life
must consist in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. These must
be unloosed and dissociated from the higher elements, And this is
effected by a closing catastrophe--Death. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p.
248.
July 1st. "Perfect correspondence," according to Mr. Herbert Spencer,
would be "perfect Life." To abolish Death, therefore, all that would be
necessary would be to abolish Imperfection. But it is the claim of
Christianity that it can abolish Death. And it is significant to notice
that it does so by meeting this very demand of Science--it abolishes
Imperfection. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 249.
July 2d. The part of the organism which begins to get out of
correspondence with the Organic Environment is the only part which is in
vital correspondence with it. Though a fatal disadvantage to the natural
man to be thrown out of correspondence with this Environment, it is of
inestimable importance to the spiritual man. For so long as it is
maintained the way is barred for a further Evolution. And hence the
condition necessary for the further Evolution is that the spiritual be
released from the natural. That is to say, the condition of the further
Evolution is Death. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 249.
July 3d. The sifting of the correspondences is done by Nature. This is
its last and greatest contribution to mankind. Over the mouth of the
grave the perfect and the imperfect submit to their final separation.
Each goes to its own--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
Spirit to Spirit. "The dust shall return to the earth as it was; and the
Spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Natural Law, Eternal Life, p.
249.
July 4th. Few things are less understood than the conditions of the
spiritual life. The distressing incompetence of which most of us are
conscious in trying to work out our spiritual experience is due perhaps
less to the diseased will which we commonly blame for it than to
imperfect knowledge of the right conditions. It does not occur to us how
natural the spiritual is. We still strive for some strange transcendent
thing; we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as they prove
unsuccessful; and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole region
prevents us seeing fully--what we already half-suspect--how completely we
are missing the road. Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
July 5th. Living in the spiritual world . . . is just as simple as living
in the natural world; and it is the same kind of simplicity. It is the
same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind of world--there are not
two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in the one are the conditions
of life in the other. And till these conditions are sensibly grasped, as
the conditions of all life, it is impossible that the personal effort
after the highest life should be other than a blind struggle carried on
in fruitless sorrow and humiliation. Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.
July 6th. Heredity and Environment are the master-influences of the
organic world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are
still ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly
understands these influences; he who has decided how much to allow to
each; he who can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the
old, so directing them as at one moment to make them cooperate, at
another to counteract one another, understands the rationale of personal
development. Natural Law, Environment, p. 255.
July 7th. To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more perfect
adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some inward evil
with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to make our
Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are the secrets
of a well-ordered and successful life. Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
July 8th. In the spiritual world . . . the subtle influences which form
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 is no life, no thought, no energy, nothing---"without Me
ye can do nothing." Natural Law, Environment, p. 265.
July 14th. The cardinal error in the religious life is to attempt to live
without an Environment. Spiritual experience occupies itself, not too
much, but too exclusively, with one factor--the soul. We delight in
dissecting this much-tortured faculty, from time to time, in search of a
certain something which we call our faith--forgetting that faith is but
an attitude, an empty hand for grasping an environing Presence. Natural
Law, Environment, p 265.
July 15th. When we feel the need of a power by which to overcome the
world, how often do we not seek to generate it within ourselves by some
forced process, some fresh girding of the will, some strained activity
which only leaves the soul in further exhaustion? Natural Law,
Environment, p. 265.
July 16th. To examine ourselves is good; but useless unless we also
examine Environment. To bewail our weakness is right, but not remedial.
The cause must be investigated as well as the result. And yet, because we
never see the other half of the problem, our failures even fail to
instruct us. After each new collapse we begin our life anew, but on the
old conditions; and the attempt ends as usual in the repetition--in the
circumstances the inevitable repetition--of the old disaster. Natural
Law, Environment, p. 265.
July 17th. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense upon
us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting for
the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But, the lesson
is soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own
achievement; and even the temporary success is mistaken for a symptom of
improved inward vitality. Once more we become self-existent. Once more we
go on living without an Environment. And once more, after days of wasting
without repairing, of spending without replenishing, we begin to perish
with hunger, only returning to God again, as a last resort, when we have
reached starvation point. Natural Law, Environment, p. 266.
July 18th. Why this unscientific attempt to sustain life for weeks at a
time without an Environment? It is because we have never truly seen the
necessity for an Environment. We have not been working with a principle.
We are told to "wait only upon God," but we do not know why. It has never
been as clear to us that without God the soul will die as that without
food the body will perish. In short, we have never comprehended the
doctrine of the Persistence of Force. Instead of being content to
transform energy we have tried to create it. Natural Law, Environment, p.
266.
July 19th. Whatever energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it
from without." We are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge AND
STRENGTH. Communion with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and
nothing will more help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the
wreck of its religious life than a common-sense hold of this biological
principle that without Environment he can do nothing. Natural Law,
Environment, p. 267.
July 20th. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but a part, a
fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss, at every turn of his
life, an absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there is room
in him for more. That God is the other part, he feels, because at times
He satisfies his need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier
symptom of his incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his
helplessness with sin? But now he understands both--the void in his life,
the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other
energy, Spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at
last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin.
This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal
state, not only of this, but of every organism--of every organism apart
from its Environment. Natural Law, p. 268.
July 21st. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is.
God is love. And to make religion akin to Friendship is simply to give it
the highest expression conceivable by man. The Changed Life, p. 49.
July 22d. The entire dependence of the soul upon God is not an
exceptional mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and
unprecedented phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man
is not taxed beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by
singular limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made
the religious life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the
spiritual life are the same as for the natural life. When, in their hours
of unbelief, men challenge their Creator for placing the obstacle of
human frailty in the way of their highest development, their protest is
against the order of Nature. Natural Law, p. 269.
July 23d. The organism must either depend on his environment, or be
self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve the arrangement by which
man in his creatural life may have unbroken access to an Infinite Power?
What soul will seek to remain self-luminous when it knows that "The Lord
God is a Sun?" Who will not willingly exchange his shallow vessel for
Christ's well of living water. Natural Law, p. 270.
July 24th. The New Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it
insists on the fact of man's dependence. In its view the first step in
religion is for man to feel his helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is
to the poor in spirit. The condition of entrance into the spiritual
kingdom is to possess the child-spirit--that state of mind combining at
once the profoundest helplessness with the most artless feeling of
dependence. Natural Law, p. 271.
July 25th. Fruit-bearing without Christ is not an improbability, but an
impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air
and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped
this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he
echoes his Master's teaching. To him life was hid with Christ in God. And
that he embraced this, not as a theory but as an experimental truth, we
gather from his constant confession, "When I am weak, then am I strong."
Natural Law, p. 271.
July 26th. One result of the due apprehension of our personal
helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the
impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will
bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we
have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having
decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more
satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy.
Following Nature, only one course is open to us. We must refer to
Environment. The natural life owes all to Environment, so must the
spiritual. Now the Environment of the spiritual life is God. As Nature,
therefore, forms the complement of the natural life. God is the
complement of the spiritual. Natural Law, p. 272.
July 27th. Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see
yourself grow, or hear the whirr of the machinery. All great things grow
noiselessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin
tells us that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, successive, and slight
modifications." The Changed Life, p. 54.