True Religion
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True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and substantiated by natural proofs, neither True Religion is it a fantastic and mystic experience of describable feelings of ecstasy which can be enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether logical.
Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions while yet in the flesh.
There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that true light which lights every man and woman who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The divine spirit makes contact with its subject mortal, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears the indwelling Spirit, is the pure mind. ‘Without holiness, no man may see the Lord.’ All such inner and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight.
Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.
While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience. Religion is born neither of mystic mediations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the domain of our moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of our spiritual insight that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing indwelling Spirit in the God-hungry mortal mind.
The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.
Thus, it may be seen that religious longings and spiritual urges are not of such a nature as would merely lead men to want to believe in God, but rather are they of such nature and power that men are profoundly impressed with the conviction that they ought to believe in God. The sense of evolutionary duty and the obligations consequent upon the illumination of revelation make such a profound impression upon man’s moral nature that he finally reaches that posit ion of mind and that attitude of soul where he concludes the he has no right not to believe in God. The higher and super philosophic wisdom of such enlightened and disciplined individuals ultimately instructs them that to doubt God or distrust his goodness would be to prove untrue to the realest and deepest thing within the human mind and soul the indwelling Spirit.
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The Certainty of Religious Faith
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