[President Coolidge, as quoted in the Boston Evening Transcript, Massachusetts]

We cannot remind ourselves too often that our right to be free, ... our obligations to each other in our domestic affairs, and our duty to humanity abroad, the confidence in each other necessary to support our social and economic relations, and finally the fabric of our government itself, all rest on religion. If the bonds of our religious convictions become loosened, the guarantees which have been erected for the protection of life and liberty and all the vast body of rights that lie between are gone. ... When we remember further that this movement is steadily advancing through the years, we realize that it provides a complete and devastating answer to the indifferent, the cynic, and the pessimist. We cannot doubt that the world is growing better. ... The light which we shed for others will depend upon the intensity of the flame which we create for ourselves. ...

Organized government and organized society have done much and can do much. Their efforts will always be necessary; but without inspiration of faith, without devotion to religion, they are inadequate to serve the needs of mankind. It is in that direction that we must look for the permanent sources of the ministrations of charity, the kindness of brotherly love, and the renunciation of consecrated lives. ... We are not seeking an increased material welfare that leads to materialism, we are seeking an increased devotion to duty that leads to spiritual life.

[From an article by Fred Smith, in the Christian Leader, Boston, Massachusetts]

"He went out, not knowing whither he went." So writes the author of the epistle to the Hebrews concerning Abraham. But Abraham knew that God knew. And for Abraham that was enough. "Wherefore," the New Testament writer goes on to say, God was "not ashamed" to be called his God. The pioneers of righteousness in all ages have found in Abraham their spiritual parent. ... In the lives of most of us there are times when religion becomes a pure adventure. We face experiences for which we have no duplicates in our memory. Fain would we know "what marvel or surprise" the future has in store, but it is veiled. It is enough that at such a time we be as Abraham. We cannot know, but we can trust. More than once have I listened to the story of some great deed done for the kingdom by a man of the Abraham type; and they have said, in humble modesty: "Had we known all that it meant to go through with the task, our hearts would have failed us for fear." But God wanted of them the seemingly impossible. He veiled the facts from them, but gave them that which was better, the power of an undefeatable faith. And the world has another demonstration that salvation is through faith rather than knowledge.

In making this contrast, however, it must not be so construed as to make it a compliment to continuing ignorance. The constant prayer of the progressing Christian is that "knowledge grow from more to more." Faith is not blindness. It is farther sight. It is giving substance to things "not seen." ... Faith is insight. To make progress we cannot always depend on what we can see. There come times when we must go forward by virtue of our ideals. ... It is through faith we become strong to endure, "as seeing him who in invisible." ... In these days we are giving much time to the study of religion, and this is well. But let us also be ready for the occasion when we have to step out for it. Let us accumulate knowledge, not that it make us cautious, but that it will make us crusaders. This was the moving faith of the Pilgrims. They did more than moralize. They moved. They studied their religion; they also sailed for it. They went out, not knowing whither they were going, though they thought they did. But God had a better thing in mind for them. The faith they had made them brave to go forward. We face an unknown future, but, remembering Abraham and all like unto him, we can face it with a tried faith. For all such religion spells more than argument, or activity; it means advancement now and forever.

[From an editorial in the Chicago Evening Post, Illinois]

Call it "soul" or what you like, the fact remains that man has within him the capacity for spiritual experience. Every man who has responded to the stimulus of beauty in his world, every man who has answered to the call for self-sacrifice, every man who has felt the pull of an ideal of truth, of honor, of service, is aware of this capacity. He knows it is there. All the efforts to explain it away, all the attempts to analyze and define and account for it cannot change the fact that it exists. When you have heard everything that psychology has to say about it, there it remains, with its possibilities no less great. It can make a life that is fine and beautiful and heroic if it be cared for and developed. If it be neglected the life will be barren and ugly and selfish. It may not be possible to take cognizance of these facts in the laboratory. They may not be susceptible to scientific test. But that is the defect of science, the limitation of the laboratory. In the actual experience of living we know these things are true. We have seen them in the lives of others. We have felt them in our own lives.

We have known the business-man who answered to the call of honor and unselfish service. We have seen him fighting his way through temptation, clinging to his ideals and becoming with the years a character to be loved and admired. ... The "cure of souls" is a phrase we may still use, a phrase we might well revive, because there is need that renewed emphasis be placed to-day upon the fact that the spiritual capacity of man, which is his capacity for the highest realization, can be developed only if care be given it. ... Much has been said about the care of the mind, and he is a shortsighted and foolish man who does not find opportunity to enrich and to enlarge his intellectual life. But are we thinking enough about the care of the soul? Have we made it a definite consideration? Are we giving it a chance to grow Godward, through beauty and service and worship? Is there in each day's program a place for the spiritual life, a provision for deliberate recognition of the fact that man does not "live by bread alone"? We need an open window toward the hills of God. We need a time set apart for tuning in to the sources of spiritual strength and enlightenment. We need a moment for getting in step with the Master of life, so that each day's living may keep in step with him.

[From an article by Cicely Hamilton, in the Daily Mirror, London, England]

Those of us who grew to our maturity in that fast-receding epoch, known as prewar, have remembrance of a world which enjoined strict reticence in the matter of religion and spiritual life; which considered it unmannerly to speak of God, His worship and service, save at times and in places appointed. It was understood in those reticent days that our Father in heaven should be treated as our Father in heaven, a Being of whom little mention was made in the ordinary affairs of our ordinary everyday life. Even those whose religion was more than mere form, whose hearts were conscious of "divine indwelling"—even these, with rare exceptions, acquiesced in the restriction, the taboo. To-day, very obviously, the taboo on religion has been lifted; and been lifted, I take it, because the thought of God, the desire for knowledge of Him, is so present and persistent in many of this generation that, at the last, the fire kindles and they speak of their desire with their tongue. We talk freely to-day of our faith or the lack of it because religion, to this generation, is more than ordered form of worship or Christian tradition; it is a need so urgent and so widely felt that the old shyness vanishes, and we speak of our God without embarrassment. Again and again in the course of the last few years I have heard men and women, little more than strangers, talk openly and eargerly of that inner and spiritual side of their lives which, in the days of my youth, we stammered of with hesitance. ... If it be granted—as I think it must be granted—that there has been a widespread change in our habit of thought as regards religion, we have to ask ourselves what has brought about the change.

There is a legend which, it seems to me, gives the answer to that question rightly. Once (so runs the story) a man of great piety, a saint of God, was asked by a disciple what he held to be the first step to Christian holiness. And the answer he gave was, "Humility." Thereupon the disciple asked, "And what is the second step?" And again the saint told him, "Humility." And "What is the third step?" brought the same reply—humility, always humility. Such is the legend; and its teaching is sane, borne out by the doctrine of every church and secular experience of mankind. Spiritual enlightenment is like every other form of enlightenment; it comes to those who are not too proud to learn, not too proud to see their errors and admit them—confess them. It is not only on the spiritual side of our nature that the humble heart is a condition of our growth; the law of progress, to whatever applied, is the same. In the realm of the spirit, as in the world of matter, we advance by a process of trial and error, by recognition of our past mistakes and determination to avoid those mistakes in the future. All that we have of civilization—of safety, comfort, material prosperity, art—we owe to men who, at one time or another, looked squarely at themselves and their work gone wrong, said: "Here I blundered. Here I was a fool!" scrapped their broken achievements, and resolved to try again and do better.

[Dr. Kerr Boyce Tupper, as quoted in the Times, Los Angeles, California]

In the Golden Rule of Jesus, which ranks high above that of Confucius or of Isocrates, we have the highest ideal of character and of conduct; and yet the criticism is not infrequently heard that these matchless words of the Palestinian teacher make too severe and impracticable demand upon human nature, too lofty and ethereal for a world like ours. But could anything short of the perfect ideal have been projected by Christ [Jesus] as that after which humanity should aspire? Is not the recognition of perfection as the standard the inspiration of all progress, whether in art or science, philosophy or literature, inventive skill and all practical endeavor? Someone has said that the Patent Office in Washington is the story, written large, of the refusal of the human mind to stop anywhere this side of perfection. Men aim to make machinery not merely serviceable but perfect, and to reach knowledge which is not only approximate but exact. Why, then, should insistence on the perfect in other departments of life cease when we enter the spiritual realm?