ll 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.

For what does this amount to in the spiritual world? Is it not merely
the scientific re-statement of the reiterated aphorism of Christ,
"Without Me ye can do nothing?" 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.

And 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."

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. And 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? 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. Not that at times we do not obtain glimpses of the true state
of the case. 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 for