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one's fellows as a mature personality.
This new gospel of the kingdom renders a great service to the art of living in that it supplies a new and richer incentive for higher living. It presents man with a new and exalted goal of destiny, a supreme life purpose, and that consciousness of unity with divinity that enables him to dare to be God-like. From such vantage points of high living, man is able to transcend the material irritations of the lower levels of thinking--worry, jealousy, envy, revenge, and the pride of immature personality. These high-climbing souls deliver themselves from a multitude of the crosscurrent conflicts of the trifles of living, thus becoming free to attain consciousness of the higher currents of spirit concept and celestial communication.
The Master regards genuine human religion as the individual's experience with spiritual realities. "I have regarded religion", Rodan says, "as man's experience of reacting to something which he regards as being worthy of the homage and devotion of all mankind. In this sense, religion symbolizes our supreme devotion to that which represents our highest concept of the ideals of reality and the farthest reach of our minds toward eternal possibilities of spiritual attainment.
We must always look upon the object of our religious loyalty as being worthy of the reverence of all men. Religion can never be a matter of mere intellectual belief; religion is always and forever a mode of reacting to the situations of life; it is a species of conduct. Religion embraces thinking, feeling, and acting reverently toward some reality which we deem worthy of universal adoration.
The religion of Jesus transcends all our former concepts of the idea of worship in that he not only portrays his Father as the ideal of infinite reality but positively declares that this divine source of values and the eternal center of the universe is truly and personally attainable by every mortal creature who chooses to enter the kingdom of heaven on earth, thereby acknowledging the acceptance of sonship with God and brotherhood with man." Rodan concludes that this is the highest concept of religion the world has ever known.
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