April 30th. Do not quarrel . . . with your lot in life. Do not complain
of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have
to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with. The
Greatest Thing in the World.

May 1st. The moment the new life is begun there comes a genuine anxiety
to break with the old. For the former environment has now become
embarrassing. It refuses its dismissal from consciousness. It competes
doggedly with the new Environment for a share of the correspondences. And
in a hundred ways the former traditions, the memories and passions of the
past, the fixed associations and habits of the earlier life, now
complicate the new relation. The complex and bewildered soul, in fact,
finds itself in correspondence with two environments, each with urgent
but yet incompatible claims. It is a dual soul living in a double world,
a world whose inhabitants are deadly enemies, and engaged in perpetual
civil war. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 179.

May 2d. How can the New Life deliver itself from the still-persistent
past? A ready solution of the difficulty would be TO DIE. . . . If we
cannot die altogether, . . . the most we can do is to die as much as we
can. . . . To die to any environment is to withdraw correspondence with
it, to cut ourselves off, so far as possible, from all communication with
it. So that the solution of the problem will simply be this, for the
spiritual life to reverse continuously the processes of the natural life.
Natural Law, Mortification, p. 180.

May 3d. The spiritual man having passed from Death unto Life, the natural
man must next proceed to pass from Life unto Death. Having opened the new
set of correspondences, he must deliberately close up the old.
Regeneration in short must be accompanied by Degeneration. Natural Law,