March 10

IT is the highest prerogative of our spiritual nature that, when we think best, it is not our own thoughts we think—that it is possible to rise above ourselves as individual minds, and to yield ourselves up to a Mind or Thought that is other and larger than our own. All intellectual and spiritual progress may be said to be measured by the degree in which we cease to think our own thoughts, abnegate all self-assertion, and let our minds become the pure media of the universal and absolute intelligence. Yet in such self-abnegation there is no pantheistic annulling of our own life as intelligent and rational beings. For the life of absolute truth or reason is not a life that is foreign to us. If it is above us, it is also within us. In yielding to it we are not quelling but realising our own truest nature. For it is the freedom and fulfilment of our spiritual being to breathe in the atmosphere of the universal life, to become the organ of the infinite reason. And the goal and perfection of our spiritual life would be reached if every movement of our mind, every pulsation of our intellectual and moral life, were identified with it, so that in isolation from it we had no life that we could call our own.

JOHN CAIRD, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity

HIS FULNESS