^101:4.3 ¶ Truth is always a revelation: autorevelation when it emerges as a result of the work of the indwelling Adjuster; epochal revelation when it is presented by the function of some other celestial agency, group, or personality.

^101:4.4 In the last analysis, religion is to be judged by its fruits, according to the manner and the extent to which it exhibits its own inherent and divine excellence.

^101:4.5 ¶ Truth may be but relatively inspired, even though revelation is invariably a spiritual phenomenon. While statements with reference to cosmology are never inspired, such revelations are of immense value in that they at least transiently clarify knowledge by:

^101:4.6 1. The reduction of confusion by the authoritative elimination of error.

^101:4.7 2. The co-ordination of known or about-to-be-known facts and observations.

^101:4.8 3. The restoration of important bits of lost knowledge concerning epochal transactions in the distant past.

^101:4.9 4. The supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge.

^101:4.10 5. Presenting cosmic data in such a manner as to illuminate the spiritual teachings contained in the accompanying revelation.

5. RELIGION EXPANDED BY REVELATION

^101:5.1 Revelation is a technique whereby ages upon ages of time are saved in the necessary work of sorting and sifting the errors of evolution from the truths of spirit acquirement.

^101:5.2 Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values. Through enlightened philosophy the mind endeavours to unite the meanings of both facts and values, thereby arriving at a concept of complete reality. Remember that science is the domain of knowledge, philosophy the realm of wisdom, and religion the sphere of the faith experience. But religion, nonetheless, presents two phases of manifestation:

^101:5.3 1. Evolutionary religion. The experience of primitive worship, the religion which is a mind derivative.

^101:5.4 2. Revealed religion. The universe attitude which is a spirit derivative; the assurance of, and belief in, the conservation of eternal realities, the survival of personality, and the eventual attainment of the cosmic Deity, whose purpose has made all this possible. It is a part of the plan of the universe that, sooner or later, evolutionary religion is destined to receive the spiritual expansion of revelation.

^101:5.5 ¶ Both science and religion start out with the assumption of certain generally accepted bases for logical deductions. So, also, must philosophy start its career upon the assumption of the reality of three things:

^101:5.6 1. The material body.

^101:5.7 2. The supermaterial phase of the human being, the soul or even the indwelling spirit.

^101:5.8 3. The human mind, the mechanism for intercommunication and interassociation between spirit and matter, between the material and the spiritual.

^101:5.9 ¶ Scientists assemble facts, philosophers co-ordinate ideas, while prophets exalt ideals. Feeling and emotion are invariable concomitants of religion, but they are not religion. Religion may be the feeling of experience, but it is hardly the experience of feeling. Neither logic (rationalization) nor emotion (feeling) is essentially a part of religious experience, although both may variously be associated with the exercise of faith in the furtherance of spiritual insight into reality, all according to the status and temperamental tendency of the individual mind.

^101:5.10 Evolutionary religion is the outworking of the endowment of the local universe mind adjutant charged with the creation and fostering of the worship trait in evolving man. Such primitive religions are directly concerned with ethics and morals, the sense of human duty. Such religions are predicated on the assurance of conscience and result in the stabilization of relatively ethical civilizations.

^101:5.11 Personally revealed religions are sponsored by the bestowal spirits representing the three persons of the Paradise Trinity and are especially concerned with the expansion of truth. Evolutionary religion drives home to the individual the idea of personal duty; revealed religion lays increasing emphasis on loving, the golden rule.

^101:5.12 Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of its expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality and the still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession of a character well on the road to the actual acquirement of a morontial personality.

^101:5.13 ¶ Evolutionary religion provides only the assurance of faith and the confirmation of conscience; revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith plus the truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. The third step in religion, or the third phase of the experience of religion, has to do with the morontia state, the firmer grasp of mota. Increasingly in the morontia progression the truths of revealed religion are expanded; more and more you will know the truth of supreme values, divine goodnesses, universal relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.

^101:5.14 Increasingly throughout the morontia progression the assurance of truth replaces the assurance of faith. When you are finally mustered into the actual spirit world, then will the assurances of pure spirit insight operate in the place of faith and truth or, rather, in conjunction with, and superimposed upon, these former techniques of personality assurance.

6. PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

^101:6.1 The morontia phase of revealed religion has to do with the experience of survival, and its great urge is the attainment of spirit perfection. There also is present the higher urge of worship, associated with an impelling call to increased ethical service. Morontia insight entails an ever-expanding consciousness of the Sevenfold, the Supreme, and even the Ultimate.

^101:6.2 Throughout all religious experience, from its earliest inception on the material level up to the time of the attainment of full spirit status, the Adjuster is the secret of the personal realization of the reality of the existence of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the secrets of your faith in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential personality of evolving man, united to the Adjuster essence of the existential God, constitutes the potential completion of supreme existence and is inherently the basis for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental personality.

^101:6.3 ¶ Moral will embraces decisions based on reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom, and sanctioned by religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of morontia personality and eventually of true spirit status.

^101:6.4 The evolutionary type of knowledge is but the accumulation of protoplasmic memory material; this is the most primitive form of creature consciousness. Wisdom embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in process of association and recombination, and such phenomena differentiate human mind from mere animal mind. Animals have knowledge, but only man possesses wisdom capacity. Truth is made accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual by the bestowal on such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.