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Religion--causes and consequences
Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality. Religious experience is the realization of the consciousness of having found God. Religious insights, spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic benevolence.
If God were not a personality, he could not become a living part of the religious experience of a human personality.
Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the real soul of mankind's cosmos.
Religion is to morality as love is to duty, as sonship is to servitude, as essence is to substance. Morality discloses a mighty Controller, a Deity to be served; religion discloses an all-loving Father, a God to be worshiped and loved. And again, this is because the spiritual potentiality of religion is dominant over the duty actuality of the morality of evolution.
To isolate part of life and call it religion is to disintegrate life and distort religion. And this is just why the God of worship claims all allegiance or none.
The gods of primitive men are, mostly, mere shadows of themselves; whereas the living God is the divine light whose interruptions constitute the creation shadows of all space.
Faith and reason
Convictions about God may be arrived at through reason, but the individual becomes God-knowing only by faith.
Though reason can always question faith, faith can always supplement both reason and logic. Reason creates the possibility that faith can transform experience into a moral certainty, even a spiritual experience.
God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth.
One may know God as truth, but to understand, to explain God, one must explore the fact of the universe.
The vast gap between the experience of the truth of God, and ignorance as to the fact of God, can only be bridged by living faith. Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between infinite truth and universal fact.
Meeting with divinity
True religious practitioners should seek to live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal.
The gospel of Jesus tremendously enhances and supernally exalts every mortal. Mortal existence must be visualized as the meeting of the human up-reach with the divine down reach.
The Universal Father, being self-existent, is also self-explanatory. He actually lives in every rational mortal, wherein his purpose is to be self-revealing. But you cannot be sure about God unless you know him. Our relationship as a child of God is the only experience that makes God's Fatherhood certain.
God is the one and only self-caused fact in the universe. The universe and God are not identical; one is cause, the other effect. The cause is absolute, infinite, eternal, and changeless; the effect both finite or transcendental, but ever changing and ever growing.
Those who would invent a religion without God are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without parents. The fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience must also be personal.
Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.
While personal religion precedes the evolution of human morals, institutional religion invariably lags behind. But being a matter of inner or personal experience, religion can never develop very far in advance of the intellectual evolution of mankind.
Religion is ever and always rooted in personal experience. And your highest religion, the life of Jesus, was just such a personal experience--man, mortal man, seeking God and finding him to the fullness during one short life in the flesh, while in that same human experience, there appeared God seeking man and finding him. And that is religion, even the highest yet revealed in the universe--the earth life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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