gotten. 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.

Now why do we do this? Why do we seek to breathe without an atmosphere,
to drink without a well? 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 without food the body will perish. In short, we have
never comprehended the doctrine of the Persistence of Force. Instead of
being content to transform energy we have tried to create it.

The Law of Nature here is as clear as Science can make it. In the words
of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth
which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount
of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and
equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] We are
dealing here with a simple question of dynamics. Whatever energy the
soul expends must first be "taken into it from without." We are not
Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge _and strength_. Communion
with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more
help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its
religious life than a common-sense hold of this plain biological
principle that without Environment he can do nothing. What he wants is
not an occasional view, but a principle--a basal principle like this,
broad as the universe, solid as nature. In the natural world we act upon
this law unconsciously. We absorb heat, breathe air, draw on Environment
all but automatically for meat and drink, for the nourishment of the
senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us from without,
can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual world we
have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare living
has to be acquired.

Now the great point in learning to l