life around us in the outer world, and that every seed we sow in it grows
after its own kind.

In the region of animal or vegetable life you see and recognise this law
on every side. You trace it sometimes as the law of improvement by
culture, sometimes as the law of degeneration.

You cultivate and tend a garden or a field, sowing, planting,
eradicating, and the growths of flower or fruit improve in proportion to
your care; but leave it to itself and the weeds choke it, and the very
fruit degenerates; your rose becomes a dog-rose--it reverts, as men say,
to a lower type.

So exactly is it with your own life; so long as it is grafted into a life
higher than your own, so long as good purposes are being sown in it and
good habits cultivated, and the bad weeded out and the Spirit of God
breathes through it, it is growing nearer to the Divine type; but neglect
it, or follow sinful impulse or low taste, and it becomes like the garden
of weeds; degeneracy begins at once, it is changing to something worse,
it is reverting to a lower type.

This is a way of expressing it which is sufficiently familiar to you. But
this is only our modern way of looking at those facts of life which were
eloquent to men of earlier times as the curse of God.

As, then, it is undoubtedly true that--

"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still,"