July 26th.  One result of the due apprehension of our personal helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves.  Our science will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion.  And having decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy.  Following Nature, only one course is open to us.  We must refer to Environment.  The natural life owes all to Environment, so must the spiritual.  Now the Environment of the spiritual life is God.  As Nature, therefore, forms the complement of the natural life.  God is the complement of the spiritual.  Natural Law, p. 272.

July 27th.  Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see yourself grow, or hear the whirr of the machinery.  All great things grow noiselessly.  You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child.  Mr. Darwin tells us that Evolution proceeds by “numerous, successive, and slight modifications.”  The Changed Life, p. 54.

July 28th.  We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around us only because its kindness is unobtrusive.  Nature is always noiseless.  All her greatest gifts are given in secret.  And we forget how truly every good and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because no pause in her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad lessons of deprivation.  Natural Law, p. 274.

July 29th.  It is not a strange thing for the soul to find its life in God.  This is its native air.  God as the Environment of the soul has been from the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in religion.  How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this high thought will appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out.  Natural Law, p. 374.

July 30th.  The alternatives of the intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism.  The Agnostic is right when he trumpets his incompleteness.  He who is not complete in Him must be for ever incomplete.  Natural Law, p. 278.

July 31st.  The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of the intellect.  Has love no future?  Has right no triumph?  Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished?  The alternatives are two, Christianity or Pessimism.  But when we ascend the further height of the religious nature, the crisis comes.  There, without Environment, the darkness is unutterable.  So maddening now becomes the mystery that men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves.  No Environment here is unthinkable.  An altar of some sort men must have—­ God, or Nature, or Law.  But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man’s incompleteness.  Natural Law, p. 279.

August 1st.  A photograph prints from the negative only while exposed to the sun.  While the artist is looking to see how it is getting on he simply stops the getting on.  Whatever of wise supervision the soul may need, it is certain it can never be over-exposed, or that, being exposed, anything else in the world can improve the result or quicken it.  The Changed Life, pp. 56, 57.