The Higher Powers of Mind and SpiritTrine, Ralph Waldo
Religion
The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit
Trine, Ralph Waldo
Mind and body; New Thought
There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that prevents many men and
women from subscribing to anything to which they cannot give their
intellectual assent, as well as their moral and spiritual assent. They
do not object to creeds. They know that a creed is but a statement, a
statement of a man's or a woman's belief, whether it be in connection
with religion, or in connection with anything else. But what they do
object to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on credulity, that is
therefore destructive of the intellectual and the moral life of every
man and every woman who allows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them,
that can be held to if one is at all honest and given to thought, only
through intellectual chicanery.
We must not forget also that God is still at work, revealing Himself
more fully to mankind through modern prophets, through modern agencies.
His revelation is not closed. It is still going on. The silly
presumption in the statement therefore--"the truth once delivered."
It is well occasionally to call to mind these words by Robert Burns,
singing free and with an untrammelled mind and soul from his
heather-covered hills:
Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write;
There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heared
But them that the truth wad indict.
It is essential to remember that we are in possession of knowledge, that
we are face to face with conditions that are different from any in the
previous history of Christendom. The Christian church must be sure that
it moves fast enough so as not to alienate, but to draw into it that
great body of intellectually alive, intellectually honest young men and
women who have the Christ spirit of service and who are mastered by a
great purpose of accomplishment. Remember that these young men and women
are now merely standing where the entire church will stand in a few
years. Remember that any man or woman who has the true spirit of service
has the spirit of Christ--and more, has the religion of the Christ.
Remember that Jesus formulated no organisation. His message of the
Kingdom was so far-reaching that no organisation could ever possibly
encompass it, though an organisation may be, and has been, a great aid
in actualising it here on earth. He never made any conditions as to
through whom, or what, his truth should be spread, and he would condemn
today any instrumentality that would abrogate to itself any monopoly of
his truth, just as he condemned those ecclesiastical authorities of his
day who presumed to do the same in connection with the truth of God's
earlier prophets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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