“I cannot explain the whole of myself without bringing in God as part of my ancestry. And I do not look toward finding Him by going back in an infinite regress in time, but rather by going forward toward a Beyond within that forever draws me. … We do carry the biological past along with us, but again there is a nucleus of moral and spiritual realities that demands another type of ancestry for its explanation. … What is the origin of my love of truth and my passion for purity of heart and my readiness to give my life for a cause that ought to triumph? Somewhere along the line upward something has emerged and is operating that was not here before. In the face of obvious material conditions that surround us we have persistent confidence in spiritual realities, just because we are inwardly allied to the Spirit that works in us.

“But it is an unending revelation. Christianity, in the best sense of the word, is eternity revealed in time,

The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love.

“As the sap flows through the branches of the vine and vitalizes the whole organism so that it bursts into the beauty and glory of foliage and blossom and finally into fruit, so through the lives of men and women, inwardly responsive and joyously receptive, the life of God as Spirit flows carrying vitality, awakening love, creating passion for goodness, kindling the fervor of consecration and producing that living body, that organism of the Spirit, that ‘blessed community,’ which continues through the centuries the revelation of God as love and tenderness and eternal goodness.”

 – Rufus M. Jones, Pathways to the Reality of God, 1931.