Our need to love lies in the experience of separateness and the resulting need to overcome the stress of separateness by the experience of union. Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Faith is a trusting and confident attitude toward God, faith may be compared with trust in one’s fellow human beings. In addition, as a cognitive act or state whereby people are said to know God or to have knowledge about him, faith may be compared with our perceptual awareness of our material environment or our knowledge of the existence of other persons. Faith is belief in revealed truths. Ultimately the object of faith is God himself. We are so constituted that faith in love overcomes the belief in hate. Our nature is that faith in life destroys our fears of death. Our nature is such that faith routs all fear all alone the line. The great affirmations of life must, of necessity, destroy their apparent opposites. We have a certain and firm knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise that we will be saved and have eternal life, and this faith in the truth is revealed to our minds, and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. There is a permanent relationship between faith and the word of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5

We do not have to experience the sorrow caused by sin, the pain caused by others’ actions, or the painful realities of mortality alone. Faith is the indispensable volitional component within the process of acquiring knowledge, and it plays a basically similar role in both religion and nonreligious life. “And we are willing to enter into a covenant with our God to do his will, and to be obedient to his commandments in all things that he shall command us, all the remainder of our days, that we may not bring upon ourselves a never-ending torment, as has been spoken by the angel, that we may not drink out of the cup of wrath of God (Mosiah 5.6).” Wherefore, we must press on with a steadfastness in God, having a perfect brightness of hope, and love of God and of all people. Wherefore, if we shall press forward, feasting upon the word of God, and endure to the end, and we shall have eternal life. As we increase our understanding of God, we soon discover that we are developing a deeper understanding of the great plan of happiness. Prayer is the communion of the soul with the oversoul, with the divine creative presence which is not only in the soul, but which is the soul. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5

The religious form of love, that which is called the love of God, is, psychologically speaking, not different. It springs from the need to overcome separateness to achieve union. The love of God has as many different qualities and aspects as the love of human beings has—and to a large extent we find the same differences. God stands for the highest value, the most desirable good. Hence, the specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person. The understanding of the concept of God must, therefore, start with an analysis of the character structure of the person who worships God. Prayer in its truest sense is not a petition, not a supplication, not a wail of despair; it is rather an alignment, a unifying process which takes place in the mind as it reaches to its divine self and to that power which is greater than human understanding. In the act of such prayerful and reverent communion with God one sense the unity of good, the completeness of life, and at times the veil of doubt is lifted and the face of reality appears. This consciousness, which has been referred to as the secret place of the Most High, is an experience rising out of the conviction that God is all there is, beside whom there is none else. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5

We are aware of God acting toward us in and through the events of the World around us, so that at all times we are having to do with God and God with us. Our concern is to draw others into this direct awareness of God, rather than to induce them to make James’s gamble. James presumes a complete absence of grounds for belief and, in this situation, he proposes a prudent gamble. Prayer, then, is communion, and this communion produces life to be good. Prayerful communion ascends to that place where unity has not yet become variety, where the unformed one is ready to take any specific shape. In this act of communion, the individual becomes copartner with the Eternal and gives birth to time, space, and conditions. A very important connection has long been recognized between faith and what may be called the cognitive freedom of the human mind in its relation to God. And not merely in works, but also in faith, has God preserved the will of humanity and free and under our own control. God is willing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their hearts, and to be hidden from those who flee from him with all their hearts, he so regulates the know of himself that he has given signs of himself, visible to those who seek him, and not to those who seek him not. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5

God, having created human beings as personal, always acts toward humans in ways which respect and preserve human’s freedom and responsibility. For this reason, God does not reveal himself to human beings in his unveiled glory, for in a direct, unmediated awareness of infinite perfection human’s frail moral autonomy would be destroyed. Therefore, the divine presence is always mediated through the events and circumstances of a World which God has created to be relatively independent sphere of interactions with him human beings. Human’s personal autonomy is protected by the fact that we can become conscious of God’s activity toward us only by an uncompelled response of faith. Faith and belief in the communion of the soul with its source is becoming pronounced rather than a petition. Belief, faith and acceptance cause one to transcend the lesser good and ascend into that holy mount within where the eyes view the World as one vast plain and one boundless reach of sky. We should think on whatsoever things are true, lovely, and of good report; we should dwell on these things rather than on their apparent opposites. We must believe that there is a divine power awaiting our use. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5