Are we getting our bearings? Do we see where we stand in truth? As we unfold in the process that we call life, God grows greater and greater, nearer and nearer, with the years of our development. We become increasingly more capable of appreciating the larger values of life; and appreciation is another name for love. He who loves, appreciates; and he who appreciates, loves. Spiritual unfoldment and intellectual development should be parallel; the intellectual is simply one phase of the spiritual. In true development, the Spirit within is seeking the Spirit without; there can be no separation. The Divine Urge is impelling us to choose a spiritual basis from which to judge and decide. There is only one retarding element to progressive unfoldment, and that is dependency upon the outer. There are many mysteries for the one who lives in the outer, some of which he never solves [95] until he changes his point of view. Absorption in the external experiences holds us out of the true satisfactions of life.

We never meet any one only on the surface, and establish any bond of understanding with him; we must look through his appearance into the man, if we would understand him. The one who meets the experiences of the home, the schoolroom, the office, the store, the pulpit, or the platform from the deep inner standpoint of high realization sees the bearing of the demands, the events, the circumstances of life upon his individual unfoldment. The man who sees these only as surface incidents falling into his life by chance, fails to establish any