In order to progress in God's way, it is necessary that the scales of materiality fall from human eyes and that they be lifted to the great fact that the discernment of Spirit is the great and necessary attainment. When we gain that viewpoint, we are on the right way.
True progress, because of its very nature, is a constant call to ceaseless activity; for it ever demands advance out of material beliefs. When it is admitted that the spiritual idea overcomes materiality, and thought is kept in line with true progression, the great task of casting off human shackles has begun. The necessity for spiritual progress is irresistible; and human resistance cannot arrest it. Progress is shaking off the withered leaves of mistaken beliefs and replacing them with the fresh leaves of spiritual understanding from the tree of divine Principle. It is driving out belief in human opinions and mortal mind processes, and reducing human ways and means, in line with corporeal sense, to their native nothingness. As the world progresses in the recognition that God is the power behind all great moral issues, human consciousness awakens to the fact that all attempts to gainsay or resist such issues must prove useless.
The steps of true progress always lead out of material beliefs and up to God. The foes of progress, which must be removed from the path, are all false mental qualities, such as envy, greed, selfishness, fear, human policy, human ambition, hypocrisy, self-will, self-righteousness, and the apathetic acceptance of the claims of established evil. In order to progress, educated beliefs, family traditions, and the claims of inherited tendencies must be firmly put aside, and recognition of the fact of man's spiritual ancestry as a child of God must reign in consciousness. This spiritual sense of man's origin must be attained by the utilization of spiritual law rising above the claims of so-called material law, which serves as a framework to mortal mind on which to hang its erroneous theories.
