The Sojourn at Rome

132:3.1Nabon was a Greek Jew and fore­most among the lead­ers of the chief mys­tery cult in Rome, the Mith­raic. While this high priest of Mith­ra­ism held many con­fer­ences with the Da­mas­cus scribe, he was most per­ma­nently in­flu­enced by their dis­cus­sion of truth and faith one evening. Nabon had thought to make a con­vert of Je­sus and had even sug­gested that he re­turn to Pales­tine as a Mith­raic teacher. He lit­tle re­al­ized that Je­sus was prepar­ing him to be­come one of the early con­verts to the gospel of the king­dom. Re­stated in mod­ern phrase­ol­ogy, the sub­stance of Je­sus’ teach­ing was:

132:3.2Truth can­not be de­fined with words, only by liv­ing. Truth is al­ways more than knowl­edge. Knowl­edge per­tains to things ob­served, but truth tran­scends such purely ma­te­rial lev­els in that it con­sorts with wis­dom and em­braces such im­pon­der­ables as hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, even spir­i­tual and liv­ing re­al­i­ties. Knowl­edge orig­i­nates in sci­ence; wis­dom, in true phi­los­o­phy; truth, in the re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of spir­i­tual liv­ing. Knowl­edge deals with facts; wis­dom, with re­la­tion­ships; truth, with re­al­ity val­ues.

132:3.3Man tends to crys­tal­lize sci­ence, for­mu­late phi­los­o­phy, and dog­ma­tize truth be­cause he is men­tally lazy in ad­just­ing to the pro­gres­sive strug­gles of liv­ing, while he is also ter­ri­bly afraid of the un­known. Nat­u­ral man is slow to ini­ti­ate changes in his habits of think­ing and in his tech­niques of liv­ing.

132:3.4Re­vealed truth, per­son­ally dis­cov­ered truth, is the su­preme de­light of the hu­man soul; it is the joint cre­ation of the ma­te­rial mind and the in­dwelling spirit. The eter­nal sal­va­tion of this truth-dis­cern­ing and beauty-lov­ing soul is as­sured by that hunger and thirst for good­ness which leads this mor­tal to de­velop a sin­gle­ness of pur­pose to do the Fa­ther’s will, to find God and to be­come like him. There is never con­flict be­tween true knowl­edge and truth. There may be con­flict be­tween knowl­edge and hu­man be­liefs, be­liefs col­ored with prej­u­dice, dis­torted by fear, and dom­i­nated by the dread of fac­ing new facts of ma­te­rial dis­cov­ery or spir­i­tual prog­ress.

132:3.5But truth can never be­come man’s pos­ses­sion with­out the ex­er­cise of faith. This is true be­cause man’s thoughts, wis­dom, ethics, and ide­als will never rise higher than his faith, his sub­lime hope. And all such true faith is pred­i­cated on pro­found re­flec­tion, sin­cere self-crit­i­cism, and un­com­pro­mis­ing moral con­scious­ness. Faith is the in­spi­ra­tion of the spir­i­tized cre­ative imag­i­na­tion.

132:3.6Faith acts to re­lease the super­hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties of the di­vine spark, the im­mor­tal germ, that lives within the mind of man, and which is the po­ten­tial of eter­nal sur­vival. Plants and an­i­mals sur­vive in time by the tech­nique of pass­ing on from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other iden­ti­cal par­ti­cles of them­selves. The hu­man soul (per­son­al­ity) of man sur­vives mor­tal death by iden­tity as­so­ci­a­tion with this in­dwelling spark of di­vin­ity, which is im­mor­tal, and which func­tions to per­pet­u­ate the hu­man per­son­al­ity upon a con­tin­u­ing and higher level of pro­gres­sive uni­verse ex­is­tence. The con­cealed seed of the hu­man soul is an im­mor­tal spirit. The sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of the soul is the first of a suc­ces­sion of per­son­al­ity man­i­fes­ta­tions of spir­i­tual and pro­gress­ing ex­is­tences, ter­mi­nat­ing only when this di­vine en­tity at­tains the source of its ex­is­tence, the per­sonal source of all ex­is­tence, God, the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

132:3.7Hu­man life con­tin­ues—sur­vives—be­cause it has a uni­verse func­tion, the task of find­ing God. The faith-ac­ti­vated soul of man can­not stop short of the at­tain­ment of this goal of des­tiny; and when it does once achieve this di­vine goal, it can never end be­cause it has be­come like God—eter­nal.

132:3.8Spir­i­tual evo­lu­tion is an ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­creas­ing and vol­un­tary choice of good­ness at­tended by an equal and pro­gres­sive diminu­tion of the pos­si­bil­ity of evil. With the at­tain­ment of fi­nal­ity of choice for good­ness and of com­pleted ca­pac­ity for truth ap­pre­ci­a­tion, there comes into ex­is­tence a per­fec­tion of beauty and ho­li­ness whose righ­teous­ness eter­nally in­hibits the pos­si­bil­ity of the emer­gence of even the con­cept of po­ten­tial evil. Such a God-know­ing soul casts no shadow of doubt­ing evil when func­tion­ing on such a high spirit level of di­vine good­ness.

132:3.9The pres­ence of the Par­a­dise spirit in the mind of man con­sti­tutes the rev­e­la­tion prom­ise and the faith pledge of an eter­nal ex­is­tence of di­vine pro­gres­sion for ev­ery soul seek­ing to achieve iden­tity with this im­mor­tal and in­dwelling spirit frag­ment of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

132:3.10Uni­verse prog­ress is char­ac­ter­ized by in­creas­ing per­son­al­ity free­dom be­cause it is as­so­ci­ated with the pro­gres­sive at­tain­ment of higher and higher lev­els of self-un­der­stand­ing and con­se­quent vol­un­tary self-re­straint. The at­tain­ment of per­fec­tion of spir­i­tual self-re­straint equals com­plete­ness of uni­verse free­dom and per­sonal lib­erty. Faith fos­ters and main­tains man’s soul in the midst of the con­fu­sion of his early ori­en­ta­tion in such a vast uni­verse, whereas prayer be­comes the great uni­fier of the var­i­ous in­spi­ra­tions of the cre­ative imag­i­na­tion and the faith urges of a soul try­ing to iden­tify it­self with the spirit ide­als of the in­dwelling and as­so­ci­ated di­vine pres­ence.

132:3.11Nabon was greatly im­pressed by these words, as he was by each of his talks with Je­sus. These truths con­tin­ued to burn within his heart, and he was of great as­sis­tance to the later ar­riv­ing preach­ers of Je­sus’ gospel.