July 8th.  In the spiritual world . . . the subtle influences which form and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment.  And here especially, where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so ill defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.

July 9th.  What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves.  No man can select his own parents.  But every man to some extent can choose his own Environment.  His relation to it, however largely determined by Heredity in the first instance, is always open to alteration.  And so great is his control over Environment and so radical its influence over him, that he can so direct it as either to undo, modify, perpetuate, or intensify the earlier hereditary influences within certain limits.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.

July 10th.  One might show how the moral man is acted upon and changed continuously by the influences, secret and open, of his surroundings, by the tone of society, by the company he keeps, by his occupation, by the books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short, that constitutes the habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little world of his daily choice.  Or one might go deeper still and prove how the spiritual life also is modified from outside sources—­its health or disease, its growth or decay, all its changes for better or for worse being determined by the varying and successive circumstances in which the religious habits are cultivated.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 260.

July 11th.  In the spiritual world . . . he will 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.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 264.

July 12th.  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.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 264.

July 13th.  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.”  Natural Law, Environment, p. 265.

July 14th.  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.  Natural Law, Environment, p 265.