. They would equip each organism with a personal
atmosphere, each brain with a private store of energy; they would grow
corn in the interior of the body, and make bread by a special apparatus
in the digestive organs. They must, in short, have the creature
transformed into a Creator. The organism must either depend on his
environment, or be self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve the
arrangement by which man in his creatural life may have unbroken access
to an Infinite Power? What soul will seek to remain self-luminous when
it knows that "The Lord God is a _Sun_?" Who will not willingly exchange
his shallow vessel for Christ's well of living water? Even if the
organism, launched into being like a ship putting out to sea, possessed
a full equipment, its little store must soon come to an end. But in
contact with a large and bounteous Environment its supply is limitless.
In every direction its resources are infinite.

There is a modern school which protests against the doctrine of man's
inability as the heartless fiction of a past theology. While some forms
of that dogma, to any one who knows man, are incapable of defence, there
are others which, to any one who knows Nature, are incapable of denial.
Those who oppose it, in their jealousy for humanity, credit the organism
with the properties of Environment. All true theology, on the other
hand, has remained loyal to at least the root-idea in this truth. The
New Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it insists on the
fact of man's dependence. In its view the first step in religion is for
man to feel his helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is to the poor in
spirit. The condition of entrance into the spiritual kingdom is to
possess the child-spirit--that state of mind combining at once the
profoundest helplessness with the most artless feeling of dependence.
Substantially the same idea underlies the countless passages in which
Christ affirms that He has not come to call the righteous, but sinners
to repentance. And in that farewell discourse into which the Great
Teacher poured the most burning convictions of His life, He gives to
this doctrine an ever increasing emphasis. No words could be more solemn
or arresting than the sentence in the last great allegory devoted to
this theme, "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide
in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." The word here, it
will be observed again, is _cannot_. It is the imp