first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and
prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher
conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only
from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and
imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the
least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may
have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural
disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.

This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the
constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and
appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society
as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary
circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the
conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom
of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least
partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing
into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and
appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness,
with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to
subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high
and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for
whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and
perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his
passionate devotion to the search after truth--the kingdom of God as
revealed in the order of the universe--exclaimed testily that he had no
time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of
self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient
quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his
brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a