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Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals by Henry Frederick Cope
page 90 of 179 (50%)

The divine voice speaks, but we too often listen in the wrong
direction. It falls not from the skies; it comes not in strange,
unusual ways of visions and portents. But it is ever speaking through
the things of daily life; it is ever revealing truth and beauty to the
inner ear, for it comes not from without but springs up within; heard
by the heart rather than by the ear.

The best things have not dropped down; they have grown up. Life is not
from without, but from within. God speaks not in thunders, but in the
hopes and the longings of hearts. Even the voice we hear in the
sighings of the wind or the message we read in the rays of setting sun
must be in us before it means aught to us.

The ten commandments owe their force not to any writing on stone but to
their writing on our hearts; to them the soul of man answers
affirmatively. The only moral code we can follow is that which speaks
with the authority of a conscience convicted. That does not mean that
man is his own God, nor that he knows no law higher than himself; it
does mean that by the laws of spiritual development the law is being
written on every heart.

Every real revelation is a divine revelation, since all truth is
divine. Once we thought the scientist the enemy of religion; now we
know that whenever science lays bare one of the facts of the universe
we do but look on what the finger of the Infinite has written. When
religion fights truth simply because truth speaks an unfamiliar tongue
or fails to respect her traditions, she is fighting against God Himself.

Our need is not some strange, awe-inspiring voice that shall break the
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