The object of prayer is not to inform God—to change his mind—therefore when you pray, retire from the world and all outward influences, and if necessary go into a room, and shut the world out with all its influences; and then, in the secret aspirations of your soul, raise your thoughts and desires to the infinite, perfect, and undying, that you may bring yourself within the plane of blessing—within the plane of that influence which can elevate you. If God could come down to our plane, and by the influx of his Spirit into our consciousness could enlighten our understandings and purify our hearts, there is no excuse for its not being done. He is infinite, and there is an infinite fullness in him; but the reason he does not, is that he can not. It is impossible that God should lie, and it would be lying if he should do this. Conditions can not be at the same time unlike and like—at the same time discordant and harmonious; the plane of lust can not harmonize with the plane of love. The plane of man in his low condition can not harmonize with the plane of the Divine in his infinitely elevated, pure, and holy condition. Therefore if a man would receive God into his consciousness, he must put himself into the condition to receive influx; and if he would have an influx from a pure Spirit, he must become pure and holy himself. If God did not teach Moses so that he could understand all truth, as did the Man of Nazareth, and understand the great principle, “Thou shalt not resist evil by evil,” it was because he did not occupy the plane of inspiration. He occupied a plane where there could be external manifestations, which he had, but he could not receive a great universal law, because he was not on the plane of the internal and divine. The inspiration of Paul, Peter, Luke, and John, was not equal to that of their Teacher, because they had not arisen to his elevated condition; had they occupied his plane, God could have communicated as well to them as to their Teacher; and it would not have been necessary for them to have a middle-man to come between them and God. When you have risen to the plane of communication, the communication is internal. You have no outward form of expression, because you have the thought itself by inspiration. In the language of the Apostle, God writes his language in your understanding and in your affections. All communication with the spiritual world proceeding according to this law, each man’s communication will be according to his plane; if in the low plane of lust, his communications will be of that character; if in the plane of love, his communications will be of that character. But even the lowest, by putting himself in the condition of prayer, by aspiring for the good and the holy, by putting up earnest petitions for aid, will always find a Spirit near to sustain and elevate him. CHAPTER V. PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRESSION.