others be in perfect health. And such, likewise, are the mysterious unity
and correlation of functions in the spiritual organism that the disease
of one member may involve the ruin of the whole. Natural Law,
Mortification, p. 187.

May 13th. To break altogether, and at every point, with the old
environment, is a simple impossibility. So long as the regenerate man is
kept in this world he must find the old environment at many points a
severe temptation. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 190.

May 14th. Power over very many of the commonest temptations is only to be
won by degrees, and however anxious one might be to apply the summary
method to every case, he soon finds it impossible in practice. Natural
Law, Mortification, p. 190.

May 15th. The ill-tempered person . . . can make very little of his
environment. However he may attempt to circumscribe it in certain
directions, there will always remain a wide and ever-changing area to
stimulate his irascibility. His environment, in short, is an inconstant
quantity, and his most elaborate calculations and precautions must often
and suddenly fail him. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 191.

May 16th. What the ill-tempered person has to deal with, . . . mainly, is
the correspondence, the temper itself. And that, he well knows, involves
a long and humiliating discipline. The case is not at all a surgical but
a medical one, and the knife is here of no more use than in a fever. A
specific irritant has poisoned his veins. And the acrid humours that are
breaking out all over the surface of his life are only to be subdued by a
gradual sweetening of the inward spirit. Natural Law, Mortification, p.
191.