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 w