July 15th.  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?  Natural Law, Environment, p. 265.

July 16th.  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.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 265.

July 17th.  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 forgotten.  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.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 266.

July 18th.  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.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 266.

July 19th.  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 biological principle that without Environment he can do nothing.  Natural Law, Environment, p. 267.