A SCIENTIFIC CATECHISM

What are you ?
I am being alive and conscious on this Earth, my ancestors having by gradual process from lower forms of animal life and with struggle beyond man.

What is the distinctive character of manhood ?
Responsibility for one's acts, having acquired the power of choosing between good and evil.

What is good and evil ?
Good is that which promotes development and is in harmony with the Will of God. Evil retards or frustrates development.

What is the duty of man ?
To assist his fellows to develop his own higher self, to strive towards good, to seek, to know the laws of nature and obey the Will of God.

How does man know good and evil ?
His own nature when uncorrupted is sufficiently in tune with the universe to enable him to be well aware in general of what is pleasing and displeasing to the guiding spirit of which he himself should be a real and effective portion.

What is Sin ?
Sin is the deliberate and willful act of a free agent who sees the better and chooses the worse. The root sin is selfishness. (Foot Note – V. R. Shinde in Heirbbent Journal.)

How comes it that evil exists ?
Acts and thoughts are evil when they are below the normal standard attained by humanity. The possibility of evil is the necessary consequence of a rise in the scale of moral existence. Just as an organization whose normal temperature is for above absolute zero is necessarily liable to damaging and delay cold. But cold is not in itself a positive or created thing.

Are there beings lower than man ?
Multitudes.

Are there beings higher than man ?
We may be sure that in some of the innumerable worlds circulating round those distant suns there must be beings for higher in the scale of existence than ourselves, indeed we have knowledge which enables us to assert the absence of intelligence anywhere.

What caused and maintain existence ?
Our own knowledge we are unable to realize the meaning of origination and maintenance, but we conceive that there must be some intelligence supreme over the whole process of evaluation, else things could not be as organized and as beautiful as they are.

How may we become informed concerning things to high for our own knowledge ?
We should strive to learn from the great teachers, the prophets and poets and saints of the human race, whose writings are opened upto us by education.

What is the communion of saints ?
Higher and holier beings must possess in fuller fruition those privileges of communion which are already fever shadowed by our own faculties of language of sympathy and of mutual aid, and just as we find that our power of friendly help is not altogether limited to our own order of being so. I conceive the existence of a mighty fellowship of love and service.

What do you understand by prayer ?
I understand that our spirits are attended to the spirit of Righteousness, our hopes and aspirations exert an influence far beyond their conscious range, and in a true sense bring us into communion with our Heavenly Father.