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Faith and Philosophy (continued)
Faith is a living attribute of genuine personal religious experience. One believes truth, admires beauty, and reverences goodness--but does not worship them. Saving faith is centered on God alone who is all of these personified and infinitely more.
The enlightened spiritual consciousness is not concerned so much with some intellectual belief or any particular mode of living as with discovering the truth of living, the good and right technique of reacting to the ever recurring situations of mortal existence.
Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates.
Religious faith is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values; it is God-knowing and mankind-serving. It vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist to heroically live the golden rule.
Though religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of its nature and function--firstly, the spiritual urge to cause religious persons to project their moral values directly outward into the affairs of their fellows (the ethical reaction of religion) and secondly, religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality derived from moral values and coordinated with superimposed spiritual values.
Religion thus provides an avenue of escape from the mutual limitations of the finite world to the supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world.
Proof and validity
Never can there be scientific or logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate the value and goodness of religious experience. But it will always remain true: 'Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall comprehend the validity of spiritual value.' This is the nearest approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering proof of the reality of religious experience. It is the only passport to the completion of reality and to the eternity of life in a universal creation of love, law, unity, and progressive deity attainment.
By following the gleam of righteousness discernible in our soul, we can identify ourselves with the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the Eternal. When we experience such a transformation of faith, we are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional child of the Universal Father.
Perfection hunger in our hearts is necessary to ensure capacity for comprehending the faith pathways to supreme attainment.
It is literally true, "Human things must be known in order to be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known."
The indwelling Father-Spirit unfailingly arouses in our souls a true and searching hunger for perfection, together with a far reaching curiosity that can only be satisfied by communion with God.
God is so real and so absolute that no material sign of proof and no demonstration through so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know God because we trust him--and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality.
The hungry soul of man refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the personal realization of the living God. Whatever more God may be than a higher moral personality, God cannot, in our hungry and finite concept, be anything less.
One of the characteristic peculiarities of genuine religious assurance is that, despite the absoluteness of its affirmations and staunchness of attitude, the spirit of its expression is so poised and tempered that it never conveys the slightest impression of self- assertion or egoistic exaltation.
The wisdom of religious experience is something of a paradox in that it is, at the same time, humanly original yet a derivative of the influence of the Divine Spirit-Within.
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