Evolutionary religion— the various religions of man— first provides the assurance of faith, and eventually the confirmation of conscience. The next, and progressive phase of the experience of religion, has to do with continuous spiritual growth— achieving an increasingly higher spiritual state. Revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith, plus the truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. Increasingly in this progression the truths of revealed religion are expanded, and increasingly we come to know the truth of supreme values, divine goodness, universal relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.
Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of an expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality, and the still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession of a character clearly on the road to the actual acquirement of a spiritualizing personality.
Revelation unfailingly enlarges the ethical horizon of evolved religion, while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral obligations of all prior revelations. But their are obligations consequent upon the illumination of epochal revelation. Revelation makes such a profound impression upon a person’s moral nature that they finally reach that place of mind and that attitude of soul where they freely conclude that they have no right not to believe in God.
The FACT of religion consists wholly in the religious experience of rational and average human beings. And this is the ONLY sense religion can be regarded as scientific, or even psychological. The proof that revelation is revelation, is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation synthesizes the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy— a coordinated and unbroken explanation of both science and religion— thus creating a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers the questionings of the mortal mind, which craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit.
Revelation compensates for the absence of a higher spiritual viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity in the comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter and spirit by the mediation of mind. But true revelation never renders science unnatural, religion unreasonable, or philosophy illogical.
Revelation is a compensation for the many frailties of an evolving philosophy. Theology deals with the intellectual content of religion; revelation deals with the philosophic aspects. Religious experience is the spiritual content of religion. Notwithstanding the mythologic vagaries and the psychologic illusions of the intellectual content of religion— the metaphysical assumptions of error, and the various techniques of self-deception, the political distortions and the socioeconomic perversions of the philosophic content of religion— the spiritual experience of personal religion remains genuine, and valid.
Reason, through the study of science, may lead one back through nature to a First Cause, but it still requires religious faith to transform the First Cause of science into a God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the actual validation of such a spiritual insight.
Finally, Revelation teaches us that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space by means of the progression of time, we should begin by the organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate wisdom to labor unremittingly at transforming self-possessed ideas into increasingly practical, but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals, that the Indwelling Spirit dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for association in the finite mind that will constitute them the actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise truth— universal truth. The coordination of idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character— the prerequisite for your personal admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the worlds to come.
