We have learned now too much of the inside of living to ever be happy with the outside form alone, and we have seen too much of the unseen forces within us to ever yield ourselves servants completely to the external powers. Our spiritual analysis is too fine to permit crude interpretation. Men are leaving the old just as the seed must forever leave the mould and dust of earth, and push its stalk up into heaven's bright sunshine.
Today we stop and in close self questioning and with a desire to know the truth, and nothing but the truth, We ask what is it that has rendered the old thought piety of our fathers unnatural and impossible to us? It does not take long to answer this if we look with eyes that have clearer sight. Men have turned away simply because they were too developed to be fed on the husks of a worn out expression that was no longer large enough to satisfy their developing thirst for Truth.
Our New Thought methods have come because men built them with their desires; they called for methods that would fit the increasing spiritual comprehension of developing humanity.
Today mankind is instinctively recoiling from every sense of separation from God which our fathers felt; human life has become more human; the outside of life is known at its real value, the inside of life is given its place and power; Love has become vitalized; human affection has become sweet and natural; human duties are blessed privileges and life is elevated to a pinnacle of power before unknown; social interests are now beginning in all and ending in all; the whole scheme of man's natural moral and religious existence has a true worth and dignity of its own, and humanity is listening, accepting and delighting to honor and obey. Only the life in the outside ranks of living will ever condemn this new rise of power, and only the cowardly can despise; it is whole, sane, sweet and divinely human and humanly divine in its application and privileges.
We lost, perhaps, a great part of the old time manner of communion with God because we first lost the old time spirit of supplication and the groveling spirit of the outside world, but we have not lost communion or devotion.
Today we are at home in the center of being, and feel and know oneness. We have union now just as those who know truth have always had, but the method differs, and Silence has taken the place of the spoken prayer, meditation and silence is the new pathway to the Cosmic heart, and through this the developing children of men walk into perfect union, receiving the messages of the Divine Host. They come into a grand comradeship with God, not in the old time spirit of supplication and service, not asking, not seeking really, not even penitentially suppliant, but in the new found glory of a faith that looks up in perfect confidence of its oneness, and which speaks from the very depth of its own glorified selfhood, and knows that "I and my Father are one and all my Father hath is mine."
The new race will keep all that is vital in the old one of prayer and communion, and it will add to it all the great power of its own awakened consciousness. We are awake now--wide awake to the despotism of the outside world and its laws--and we are equally awake to the law of the inner side of life and the dominion of the world of pure Being.
Today the silence of our new understanding has become for developed humans the pathway of God, and it is indeed the pool of Siloam in which all may bathe and be healed.
The Silence becomes for those who seek it a well of living water that springs up into everlasting life.
It is promised that "the pure in heart shall see God," and anyone who comes away from the outside of life and comes stripped to the soul into the inner side of his own being will find God there, for like the vision of the monk, He is always there, waiting to be manifest.