1 Corinthians 15:33 Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. That environment is an immense and controlling natural law for the sustenance of life has come to be a fact as conceded and confessed as that Biogenesis, or life only proceeding from life, is the inexorable natural law for the beginning of life. Environment, as the natural law for the sustenance of life, is energetic, with two main influences upon life. The first influence is that of variation. The life itself varies as the environment gets changed. Hunter put a sea-gull into such environment that it could only get grain to eat. The result was that the stomach of a bird, normally adapted to a fish diet, came in time to resemble in structure the gizzard of a grain feeder like the pigeon. Holmgren fed pigeons for a lengthened period on meat diet, and their gizzards became carnivorous stomachs. How constant and controlling this varying power upon life is, is seen in the adjustment of animals to their habitat — the flounder, burying himself in the mud and sand at the bottom of its sea or river, takes on its hue; the fur of the polar bear is white as are the arctic snows amid which it lives; the alternating narrow stripes of shadow and sunshine inter-braided amid the tangled Indian jungles are photographed and stereotyped upon the Bengal tiger which seeks its prey among them. But is not this varying force of environment upon life a natural law for life as thoroughly energetic in the spiritual world as in what we call the natural? What man's spiritual life does not get shape and take on colour from his environment? The books he reads, the social atmosphere in which he is immersed, the daily business to which he sets his hand, the companionships he chooses — how do their varieties, their purities or impurities, their nobleness or lowness, react into variations within himself. The law of environment which, in the natural world, bleaches the brown coat of the hare into the white coat of it in the arctic regions, is only the same law plying its changes upon man in the spiritual world. Parallel Verses KJV: Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.WEB: Don't be deceived! "Evil companionships corrupt good morals." |
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