Eternal progression

“ Therefore, as one earth and its accompanying heaven shall pass away, having filled the measure of its creation, so shall others come. There is no end to the works and the words of the Father, for in this there is eternal progression. ”

“ This temporal, transitory life in this world (i.e. natural life) we have through God, who is the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. But the eternal untransitory life we have through the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. ”

“ Progress — growth and expansion — 'through the increasing ages' is what the soul is capable of and hankers after ; and to stop short of the everlasting is virtually to renounce the eternal God. Here the precept of the wise and the holy, the outcome of profound spiritual experience, corroborates the hopes and the longings of our own souls. ”

“ It is the resurrection from a natural to a spiritual state of life;—from a state of sin or moral death, to a state of holiness; from the old, carnal, selfish life, to the new life of disinterested neighborly love which is the Lord's own life and the very essence of heaven. As the old man with his affections and lusts dies or is put off, and our inner man is renewed after the image of Jesus Christ, we rise to a new and higher life—to that which is meant by "the life eternal." This is the kind of resurrection to which the Lord referred when He said: "I am the resurrection and the life;" ”

“ And just such a survey, and just such a life, not timeless, but time-inclusive, constitute the eternal, which is real, not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning. ”

“ The time of restoration, by the presence of the glory of Christ, will be the morning of judgment, and resurrection. That morning will be the last of time: then eternity begins. From that time, each man will dwell in his everlasting home: the ungodly in a lake of fire, that will burn for ever; while the joy, and happiness of the blest will know no end.
“Oh the fearfulness of the word everlasting, written over the door of the lake of fire! Oh the happiness it will create when read above the eternal kingdom!
“Time is the age of the visible world; but eternity is the age of God. ”

“ In the eternity of the past, upon the personalization of the Infinite Spirit the divine personality cycle becomes perfect and complete. The God of Action is existent, and the vast stage of space is set for the stupendous drama of creation—the universal adventure—the divine panorama of the eternal ages. ”

“ The practical part of our religion is that which more particularly interests me. Still my mind reflects upon life, death, eternity, knowledge, wisdom, the expansion of the soul, and the knowledge of the Gods that are, that have been, and that are to be. What shall we say? We are lost in the depth of our own thoughts. Suppose we say there was once a beginning to all things, then we must conclude there will undoubtedly be an end. Can eternity be circumscribed? If it can, there is an end of all wisdom, knowledge, power, and glory—all will sink into eternal annihilation. ”

“ And this Faith and Knowledge arising thus, in its fulness, at most only on occasion, and never because, of spacial and temporal signs, are conceived as a timeless, Eternal Life, and as one which is already, here and now, an actual present possession. “He who believeth in the Son, hath eternal life”; “He who heareth and believeth My word, hath eternal life”; “We know that we have passed from death unto life” ”

“ He is a member of a new order; he is "heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up of life." ”

“ Regeneration restores man to his forfeited life, the unfallen life of the Son of God, the life which has never wavered from steadfast fellowship with the Father. "I give unto them eternal life," says Jesus. Is eternal life without end? ”

“ One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, continued and retained when the Science of Being is understood, would bridge over, with Life discerned spiritually, the interval of death; and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown. Time is a mortal thought, whose divisor is the solar year. Eternity is God's measurement of Soul-filled years. ”

“ Hence we see that no words can more forcibly express the grand characteristics of eternity than these. It is that duration which is concealed, hidden, or kept secret from all created beings; which is always existing, still running On but never running Out; an interminable, incessant, and immeasurable duration; it is That, in the whole of which God alone can be said to exist, and that which the eternal mind can alone comprehend. ”

“ It carries us not in the currents of temporal things, but it points to those of true eternal interest. Our allotted destiny is the regeneration of the soul. We were born to that end; we are to live in the light of that thought; we are to pass on with all preparations made. And will God set us down to an imperfect lesson in geology when the eternal welfare of the soul is at stake? ”

“ To me the doctrine of an eternal continuity of development has no terrors; for, believing matter to be, in its ultimate essence, spiritual, I see in every cosmic revolution a 'change from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.' I can look down the uncreated, unbeginning past without the sickness of bewildered faith. My Father worketh hitherto. My sense of eternal order is no longer jarred by the sudden appearance in the universe of a dead, inane substance foreign to God and spiritual being. ”

“ The details and the processes of the judgment, together with its results, are to be sought for in the writings of the prophets and in the Book of Revelation. Now, when account is taken of all events of that future life, it may be said, I think, with truth, that the righteous who live and act in it throughout, when that life begins enter into 'eternal life,' the word 'eternal' being applicable because that age has a time-limit. ”

“ The eternity of his nature; if he is from everlasting, he will be to everlasting, and we must have recourse to this first principle, when things seen, which are temporal, are discouraging, that we have hope and help sufficient in a god that is not seen, that is eternal. "Art thou not from everlasting, and then wilt thou not make bare thy everlasting arm, in pursuance of thy everlasting counsels, to make unto thyself an everlasting name?" ”

“ There are three conditions of the earth spoken of in the inspired writings—the present, in which everything pertaining to it must go through a change which we call death; the millennial condition in which it will be sanctified for the residence of purer intelligences, some mortal and some immortal, and the celestial condition spoken of in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of Revelation, which will be one of immortality and eternal life. ”

“ He regards as one fact the resurrection of the Lord Christ, who brought his body again from the grave and entered into life eternal, and the resurrection of ourselves, who, by virtue of his rising, shall likewise be raised: first, the soul, from a trivial and guilty life shall rise into a true, divine and happy existence ”

“ That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our “immortality,” if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” ”

“ Betwixt a minute and a million of years there is some proportion, but betwixt time and eternity there is none. The long lives of the patriarchs were nothing to God, not so much as the life of a child (that is born and dies the same day) is to theirs. 2. All the events of a thousand years, whether past or to come, are as present to the Eternal Mind as what was done yesterday, or the last hour, is to us, and more so. God will say, at the great day, to those whom he has turned to destruction, Return—Arise you dead. ”

“ Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem, must end in time. The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul presupposes an eternal origin.... An obvious objection, and one often urged against this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a previous life.... The new organisation with its new entries must necessarily efface the record of the old. ”

“ You remember some time ago in our talk on the law of eternal progress we established the truth that there always have been intelligences evolving from lower to higher life, which in the eternity of the past would inevitably lead to the perfection of Gods. ”

“ Such the Mormon view of the universe and the modes of existence in it—briefly outlined. These existences, both of the thinking substance, and the grosser materials, are subject to infinite changes and developments, in which there are no ultimates. Each succeeding wave of progress may attain higher, and ever higher degrees of excellence, but never attain perfection—the ideal recedes ever as it is approached, and hence progress is eternal, even for the highest existences. ”

“ The Father is infinite, the Son is infinite, the Holy Ghost is infinite. The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Ghost is eternal. And yet these are not three eternal Beings but one eternal Being. As also there are not three uncreated beings, nor three infinite beings, but one uncreated and one infinite Being. ”

“ The life for eternity is already begun: we are at and from the very hour of our regeneration introduced into the spiritual world—a world which, though mysterious and invisible, is as real as the world of sense around us: the Christian’s life of heavenliness is the first stage of heaven itself! ”

“ All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination, who appear’d to Me as Coming to Judgment among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establish’d. ”

“ That is a very necessary statement in regard to the aspect of truth which we emphasize under the general heading of 'Spiritual Growth', or 'Growth in the Divine Life'. On the one hand, we know that spiritual experience is marked by certain crises which are in some cases like earthquakes or tidal waves; whilst, on the other hand, the law of progression must be in constant operation.
We speak of conversion as a crisis, because a man in a moment 'passes from death unto life'; or, in the Saviour's words, is 'born again'. ”

“ Regeneration is foreseen and provided for from Eternity.
With those who are being regenerated interior and exterior things are arranged in order by the Lord for all following states insomuch that things present involve things future, and things future when they become present do the same, and this to eternity; for the Lord foresees all things and provides all things, and His foresight and providence is to eternity, and so eternal. For the Divine which alone is His in itself is infinite, and what is infinite in respect to duration is eternal. ”

“ Thus does regeneration become a work of orderly progress and successive growth. Guided by the Lord, it is brought forward under his never ceasing energies. It is begun in chaos and ends in the glorious likeness of Divinity. This, and manifold more, the parable of the Creation sets forth, in its beautiful symbols, concerning the beginnings of the soul, its progress through the stages of its advancing career, the nature of each successive state, and the quality of its celestial outcomes. ”

“ The process of overcoming is an ascending process, with the eye fixed upon the eternal mountain tops of spiritual supremacy. Give constant recognition to the very highest states of spiritual supremacy that you can possibly discern, and desire all the elements of your being to move perpetually towards those sublime states. You thus produce this ascending process; you will begin to grow out of, to rise out of everything that you have wished to overcome ”

“ Such is, and such ought to be, the cycle and succession of existence. Such is the cycle and revolution of the material world.
It is the same with the spiritual cycles of the Prophets—that is to say, the day of the appearance of the Holy Manifestations is the spiritual springtime; it is the divine splendor; it is the heavenly bounty, the breeze of life, the rising of the Sun of Reality. Spirits are quickened; hearts are refreshed and invigorated; souls become good; existence is set in motion; human realities are gladdened, and grow and develop in good qualities and perfections. ”

“ For it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of, Eternity. ”

“ Our earthly or temporal existence is merely a continuance of that which is spiritual. Every step we take in the great journey of life, the great journey of eternity, is a step in advance or in retrogression. We are here in mortality, it is true; but we are ahead of that condition we occupied before we came here and took upon us mortality. We are a step in advance of our former state. What is the body without the spirit? It is lifeless clay. ”

“ The genesis of every soul lies back in the eternity past, beyond the horizon of our full comprehension, and what we call a beginning is as truly a consummation and an ending, just as mortal birth is at once the commencement of earth life and the termination of the stage of antemortal existence. ”