ty. So long as the regenerate man is
kept in this world he must find the old environment at many points a
severe temptation. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 190.

May 14th. Power over very many of the commonest temptations is only to be
won by degrees, and however anxious one might be to apply the summary
method to every case, he soon finds it impossible in practice. Natural
Law, Mortification, p. 190.

May 15th. The ill-tempered person . . . can make very little of his
environment. However he may attempt to circumscribe it in certain
directions, there will always remain a wide and ever-changing area to
stimulate his irascibility. His environment, in short, is an inconstant
quantity, and his most elaborate calculations and precautions must often
and suddenly fail him. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 191.

May 16th. What the ill-tempered person has to deal with, . . . mainly, is
the correspondence, the temper itself. And that, he well knows, involves
a long and humiliating discipline. The case is not at all a surgical but
a medical one, and the knife is here of no more use than in a fever. A
specific irritant has poisoned his veins. And the acrid humours that are
breaking out all over the surface of his life are only to be subdued by a
gradual sweetening of the inward spirit. Natural Law, Mortification, p.
191.

May 17th. The man whose blood is pure has nothing to fear. So he whose
spirit is purified and sweetened becomes proof against these germs of
sin. "Anger, wrath, malice and railing" in such a soil can find no root.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 192.

May 18th. The Mortification of a member . . .is based on the Law of
Degeneration. The useless member here is not cut off, but simply relieved
as much as possible of all exercise. This encourages the gradual decay of
the parts, and as it is more and more neglected it ceases to be a channel
for life at all. So an organism "mortifies" its members. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 193.

May 19th. Man's spiritual life consists in the number and fulness of his
correspondences with God. In order to develop these he may be constrained
to insulate them, to enclose them from the other correspondences, to shut
himself in with them. In many ways the limitation of the natural life is
the necessary condition of the full enjoyment of the spiritual life.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 195.

May 20th. No man is called to a life of self-denial for its own sake. It
is in order to a