October 6

The soul, in its highest sense, is a vast capacity for God. It is like a curious chamber added on to being, and somehow involving being, a chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God’s image is left without God’s Spirit. One cannot call what is left a soul; it is a shrunken, useless organ, a capacity sentenced to death by disuse.

Nature has her revenge upon neglect as well as upon extravagance. Misuse, with her, is as mortal a sin as abuse.