nvironment. No matter what its possibilities may be, no matter what
seeds of thought or virtue, what germs of genius or of art, lie latent
in its breast, until the appropriate environment present itself the
correspondence is denied, the development discouraged, the most splendid
possibilities of life remain unrealized, and thought and virtue, genius
and art, are dead. The true environment of the moral life is God. Here
conscience wakes. Here kindles love. Duty here becomes heroic; and that
righteousness begins to live which alone is to live forever. But if this
Atmosphere is not, the dwarfed soul must perish for mere want of its
native air. And its Death is a strictly natural Death. It is not an
exceptional judgment upon Atheism. In the same circumstances, in the
same averted relation to their environment, the poet, the musician, the
artist, would alike perish to poetry, to music, and to art. Every
environment is a cause. Its effect upon me is exactly proportionate to
my correspondence with it. If I correspond with part of it, part of
myself is influenced. If I correspond with more, more of myself is
influenced; if with all, all is influenced. If I correspond with the
world, I become worldly; if with God, I become Divine. As without
correspondence of the scientific man with the natural environment there
could be no Science and no action founded on the knowledge of Nature, so
without communion with the spiritual Environment there can be no
Religion. To refuse to cultivate the religious relation is to deny to
the soul its highest right--the right to a further evolution.[64] We
have already admitted that he who knows not God may not be a monster; we
cannot say he will not be a dwarf. This precisely, and on perfectly
natural principles, is what he must be. You can dwarf a soul just as
you can dwarf a plant, by depriving it of a full environment. Such a
soul for a time may have "a name to live." Its character may betray no
sign of atrophy. But its very virtue somehow has the pallor of a flower
that is grown in darkness, or as the herb which has never seen the sun,
no fragrance breathes from its spirit. To morality, possibly, this
organism offers the example of an irreproachable life; but to science it
is an instance of arrested development; and to religion it presents the
spectacle of a corpse--a living Death. With Ruskin, "I do not wonder at
what men suffer, but I wonder often at what they lose."

FOOTNOTES:

[55] "Princ