line. When the first men and women were created, forces were set in
action which have resulted in this Me that to-day thinks and wills and
loves. Heredity includes savagery and culture, health and disease,
empire and serfdom, hope and despair. Each man can say: "In me rise
impulses that ran riot in the veins of Anak, that belonged to Libyan
slaves and to the Ptolemaic line. I am Aryan and Semite, Roman and
Teuton: alike I have known the galley and the palm-set court of kings.
Under a thousand shifting generations, there was rising the combination
that I to-day am. In me culminates, for my life's day, human history
until now."

Individuality is thus a unique selection and arrangement of what has
been, touched with something--a degree of life--that has not been
before. To rise above heredity is to rise above the downward drag of all
the years. It is not escaping the special sin of one ancestor, but the
sin of all ancestors. _This is the first problem that is set before each
man: to rise above his race--to be the culmination of virtue until now_.

_The second problem is not greater, but different. It is to mould
environment to spiritual uses_. The conditions of this struggle and the
opportunities of this conquest are the content of this book. It is meant
to deal with the more heroic aspects of the Christian life.

What is environment? Is it the material horizon that bounds us? If so,
where does it end? Our first environment is a crib, a room, our mother's
eyes. Sensations of hunger, heat, and motion beat upon the baby-brain;
there is a vague murmur of sound in the baby-ears. Yet it is this babe
who, in after days, has all the universe for his soul's demesne! His
environment stretches out to towns and rivers, shore and sea. Looking
upward into space, he can view a star whose distance is a thousand times