Humankind never stops moving forward. Progress must also take place in faith.
People’s way of life depends on their faith. With the passing of time, faith become simpler, clearer, more understandable and in greater harmony with true knowledge. And as faith become simpler and clearer, people become ever more united.
If someone thinks that we should stop at the understanding of faith that has been revealed to us at present, then he is far from the truth. The light we have received was given to us not so that we could stop looking at it, but so that it could reveal to us new truths that still remain hidden from us.
— After Milton
The Spirit of Christ, which the powers of this world are trying to stifle from the height of their thrones and rostra, is nevertheless clearly manifested everywhere. Has not the spirit of the gospel spread through the people? Are they not starting to see the light? Have not the notions of rights and duties become clearer for everyone? Do we not hear calls from all sides for laws that are more just, for institutions to protect the weak, founded upon a just equality? Is not the former enmity between those whom the masters have divided fading away? Do the nations not feel themselves as brothers? The oppressors are already trembling, as if their inner voice is foretelling their imminent end. Alarmed by the terrible visions, the kings are convulsively squeezing the chains with which they had shackled the nations for whose liberation Christ had come, and which will soon shatter. An underground boom is disturbing their dream. In the secret depths of society work is taking place, which they cannot stop with all the power of their authority and whose continuous success plunges them into an inexpressible alarm. It is the work of a germ that is ready to develop, a work of love, which will remove sin from the world, reanimate the life which has grown weak, console those in distress, shatter the chains of the imprisoned, and open a new path of life for the people, whose inner law will no longer be violence, but love for one another.
— Lamennais
Humankind progresses only because faith is progressing. The progress of faith does not consist in revelations of new religious truths, nor in searching for a new relationship of human beings to the world and its Source—there is nothing new—but in discarding everything superfluous which has been attached to religious understanding. There are no new religious truths: for as long as we know of the rational human being, his relationship to the world and its Source was the same as it is now. If there is progress in religion, then it does not lie in discovering something new, but only in clarifying what has already been revealed and expressed.
Faith is an indicator of the highest understanding of life accessible at a given time to the best, leading people of a given society, to which the rest of the people of this society inevitably and invariably draw nearer.
We must not confuse true progress—religious progress—with technical, scientific and artistic progress. There can be great technical, scientific and artistic accomplishments alongside religious backwardness, as is the case in our time.
If you want to serve God, then you should above all be a worker of religious progress, which consists in the battle with superstitions and in the clarification and simplification of religious consciousness.
