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The Indwelling Presence of God.
"Know you not that you are the temple of God, that the Spirit of God dwells in you." (1 Cor. 3-16)
However this indwelling presence of God's spirit has no special mechanism through which to gain self-expression. The divine Spirit makes contact with mortal man, 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 spiritual insight. Such religious experiences result from the impression made upon the mind of man by the operations of the divine Spirit--as it functions amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of these evolving sons and daughters of God.
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 nor in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known. 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. It is, 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 meditations 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 man's moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of man's spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Spirit in the God-hungry mortal mind.
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values--and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true 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 us to want to believe in God, but rather are they of such nature and power that we are profoundly impressed with the conviction that we 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 our moral nature that we finally reach that position of mind and attitude of soul where we conclude that we have 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 Presence of God.
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