Some persons discern and interpret the golden rule as a purely intellectual affirmation of human fraternity. Others experience this expression of human relationship as an emotional gratification of the tender feelings of the human personality. Another mortal recognizes this same golden rule as the yardstick for measuring all social relations, the standard of social conduct. Still others look upon it as being the positive injunction of a great moral teacher who embodied in this statement the highest concept of moral obligation as regards all fraternal relationships. In the lives of such moral beings the golden rule becomes the wise center and circumference of all their philosophy.

   In the kingdom of the believing brotherhood of God-knowing truth lovers, this golden rule takes on such qualities of spiritual realization as to cause the mortal children of God so to relate themselves to their fellows that they will receive the highest possible eternal good as a result of the believer's contact with them. This is the essence of true religion: that you love your neighbor as God loves you.

   But the highest realization and the truest interpretation of the golden rule consists in the consciousness of the truth of the living reality of such a divine declaration. The true meaning of this rule of universal relationship is revealed only in its spiritual realization--in its interpretation to the individual by the Spirit of God that indwells the souls of all mortal mankind.

   For when such spirit-led mortals realize the true meaning of this golden rule, they are filled to overflowing with the assurance of citizenship in a friendly universe, and their ideals of spirit reality are satisfied only when they love their fellows as God loves us all--and that is the actuality of the realization of the love of God.

   This same philosophy of the living flexibility and cosmic adaptability of divine truth to the individual requirements and capacity of every child of God must be perceived before you can hope adequately to understand its teaching and the practice of non-resistance to evil--for both teachings are basically spiritual pronouncements.

   Even the material implications of this philosophy cannot be helpfully considered apart from their spiritual correlations. The spirit of the injunction not to resist evil consists in the abandonment of all selfish reaction to the world, coupled with the aggressive and progressive attainment of righteous levels of true spirit values: divine beauty, infinite goodness, and eternal truth--to know God and to become increasingly like him.

   Love, unselfishness, must undergo a constant and living re-adaptive interpretation of relationships in accordance with the leading of the indwelling divine Spirit. Love must thereby grasp the ever-changing and enlarging concepts of the highest eternal good of the individual who is loved. And then love goes on to strike this same attitude concerning all other individuals who could possibly be influenced by the growing and living relationship of one spirit-led mortal's love for all other citizens of the world--and this entire living adaptation of love must be effected in the light of both the environment of present evil and the eternal goal of the perfection of divine destiny.

   And so must we clearly recognize that neither the golden rule nor the teaching of non-resistance can ever be properly understood as dogmas or precepts. They can only be comprehended by living them, by realizing their meanings in the living interpretation of the indwelling divine Spirit that directs the loving contact of each human being with another--provided we will listen.

   All this clearly indicates the difference between the old religions and the new. The old religions teach self-sacrifice; the new religion teaches only self-forgetfulness, enhanced self-realization in social service and universe comprehension. The old religions are much motivated by fear; the new gospel of the kingdom is dominated by truth-conviction, the spirit of eternal and universal truth. No amount of piety or creedal loyalty can compensate for the absence in the life experience of kingdom believers of that spontaneous, generous, and sincere friendliness which characterizes the spirit-born children of the living God. Neither tradition nor a ceremonial system of formal worship can atone for the lack of genuine compassion and genuine love for all one's fellows. (1950/51)