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SearchThe Exhilaration of the Personal Quest for Truth
And for a long time there will live on earth those timid, fearful, and hesitant individuals who will
prefer thus to secure their religious consolations, even though, in so casting their lot with the
religions of authority, they compromise the sovereignty of personality, debase the dignity of selfrespect, and utterly surrender the right to participate in that most thrilling and inspiring of all
possible human experiences: the personal quest for truth, the exhilaration of facing the perils of
intellectual discovery, the determination to explore the realities of personal religious experience,
the supreme satisfaction of experiencing the personal triumph of the actual realization of the
victory of spiritual faith over intellectual doubt as it is honestly won in the supreme adventure of
all human existence--man seeking God, for himself and as himself, and finding him.
The religion of the spirit means effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty, and
progress. The religion of the mind--the theology of authority--requires little or none of these
exertions from its formal believers. Tradition is a safe refuge and an easy path for those fearful
and halfhearted souls who instinctively shun the spirit struggles and mental uncertainties
associated with those faith voyages of daring adventure out upon the high seas of unexplored
truth in search for the farther shores of spiritual realities as they may be discovered by the
progressive human mind and experienced by the evolving human soul.
And Jesus went on to say: "At Jerusalem the religious leaders have formulated the various
doctrines of their traditional teachers and the prophets of other days into an established system of
intellectual beliefs, a religion of authority.
The appeal of all such religions is largely to the mind. And now are we about to enter upon a
deadly conflict with such a religion since we will so shortly begin the bold proclamation of a
new religion--a religion which is not a religion in the present-day meaning of that word, a
religion that makes its chief appeal to the divine spirit of my Father which resides in the mind of
man; a religion which shall derive its authority from the fruits of its acceptance that will so
certainly appear in the personal experience of all who really and truly become believers in the
truths of this higher spiritual communion."