e the highest organisms the most mobile, but the highest
parts of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower.
Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing
variation in the body of a child; but how plastic is its mind! How
infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be tuned to
music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward
lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made or
unmade, by external circumstance! Might we not all confess with
Ulysses,--

"I am a part of all that I have met?"

Much more, then, shall we 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?

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. The possibility of
it depends upon the mobility of the organism; the result, on the extent
and frequency of certain correspondences. These facts insensibly lead on
to further suggestion. Is it not possible that these biological truths
may carry with them the clue to a still profounder philosophy--even that
of Regeneration?

Evolutionists tell us that by the influence of environment certain
aquatic animals have become adapted to a terrestrial mode of life.
Breathing normally by gills, as the result and reward of a continued
effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of
heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young
organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists--as in the
tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches, the true lung
appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It
then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the
adult is conducted by lungs alone. [1] We may be far, in the meantime,
from saying that this is proved. It is for those who accept it to deny
the justice of the spiritual analogy. Is religion to them unscien