Charles Sherlock Fillmore Quotes

God is Spirit in whom we "live, and move, and have our being." We are the offspring of this Spirit and can make conscious contact with it by turning our attention away from material things and thinking about Spirit. As we practice this kind of prayer our innate Spirit showers its life energies into our conscious mind and a great soul expansion follows.

We have been so persistently taught that prayer consists in asking God for some human need that we have lost sight of our spiritual identity and have become a race of praying beggars.

Above all practice the presence of God in prayer. Divine Mind has given us all potentialities, in prayer we recognize it as the source of these, and with a right understanding of our relation to it our soul grows great with infinite capacity, all potentiality. "With God all things are possible." "All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine."

When we frame our desires in sound words and place them before our indwelling Lord, we are using intelligently the supreme law of God in bringing into manifestation that which He has implanted in us. A prayer without desire in it, a prayer without sincerity in it, a prayer without soul in it, a prayer without Spirit in it is a fruitless prayer.

All growth and unfoldment from atom to sun is based upon this law of soul urge. What you earnestly desire and persistently affirm will be yours, if you "faint not."

As in all matters where we seek divine help we are free to use any words we choose or no words at all...Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed... Prayer in man is a conscious expression of the upward trend of nature found everywhere. So every impulse or desire of the soul for life, love, light, is a prayer.

The Lord's Prayer was given as a sample: not to be followed literally... according to Fenton's translation it is a series of affirmations, as follows:
Our Father in the Heavens; Your Name must be being hallowed; Your kingdom must be being restored; Your will must be being done, both in Heaven and upon the Earth.
Give us to-day our tomorrow's bread;
And forgive us our faults, as we forgive those offending us, for You would not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from its evil.

When Jesus' disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray He warned them against making a display of their praying in order to be seen of men. They should retire to their "inner chamber" and pray to the Father who sees in secret and rewards openly. Then He said, "After this manner therefore pray."

We need never look for universal peace on this earth until men stop killing animals for food.

Therefore, in the light of the Truth that God is love, and that Jesus came to make his love manifest in the world, we cannot believe it is his will for men to eat meat, or to do anything else that would cause suffering to the innocent and helpless.

Before they are slain these poor brutes are maltreated in ways almost beyond enumeration. Visit shipping pens, stocktrains, stockyards and packinghouses, if you want evidence of the sufferings of the poor beasts of the field. And these very sufferings are through the law of sympathetic mental vibrations transferred to the flesh of those who eat the bodies of these animals. The undefined fears, the terrors of the nightmare, and the many disturbances in stomach and bowels that man endures may be in a measure traced to these unsuspected sources.