96/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
The world of Religion comprehends those phases of life which concern the attitude of the individual man toward other beings. Its mode of expression, like the natural world, represents the Absolute Essence of things, differentiated in variously related centers. The Supreme Being, fellow men, and hosts of inferior creatures, appeal to the individual, prompting emotions of reverence, love, sympathy, compassion.
When man first begins to realize something of the higher consciousness, to know that he is more than a superior animal, and that the human creature is nothing less than a crude, embryotic expression of divinity, the idea of Deity begins to dawn upon him, as his conception of the supreme excellence.
He idealizes the noblest traits and attributes he is acquainted with in humanity, and pictures them to himself in an imaginary form which he enthrones, after the fashion of earthly potentates, as the sovereign ruler of the universe. The character of this image alters with the thought that projects it. Every man’s conception of the Supreme Being seems to him exactly to correspond to the Eternal Reality.
The materialistic mind finds only a materialistic God, and the vindictive mind, a God of vengeance; while the spiritual seer discerns a purely spiritual God, transcending the most exalted ideal which the finite mind is capable of conceiving a “God of the living” beyond its power to image, and discoverable only as an immianent Presence by those who seek to manifest the divine life.
A spiritual type of religion discards perfunctory worship and refrains from judging by the artificial standard of conduct.
It encourages men to reach out and up spontaneously toward the ideal fountain of goodness, as plants grow toward the sunlight. It offers, as an incentive for living, the enjoyment of freedom, not the sufferance of restraint.
Work that seemed irksome when performed reluctantly, under the forced demand of duty, proceeds without friction, and is esteemed a privilege when undertaken in the spirit of freedom. Nature manifests in superabundance the freedom of the creative Spirit. So also, to him “that hath ears to hear,” Religion speaks, in broadest accents, a language of freedom.
Not everyone is privileged to enjoy a life of freedom in the world of Nature, under the most satisfying conditions; but everyone may retire at frequent intervals, be it only for a moment, to the inner realm of the soul, where, at the heart of the universe, the finite meets the Infinite, in simple, undisguised spiritual intercourse, untrammeled by the conventional dictates of dogmatic theology.