If we consider the spiritual message of the Society of Friends apart from its social message, we must realize the spiritual and social are as intimately related as the two sides of a door--you can't have one without the other. We can think of the spiritual as primarily concerned with our relation with our God and the social as primarily concerned with our relation to our fellow people. Each is dependent on the other, however. In Quaker writings, the phrase, "joined to the Lord," seldom appears without the corresponding phrase, "and to one another."

The word, "spiritual" has many meanings, most of them vague. We use it in two clearly defined senses. First, it designates our relation to the divine, which is within us, as well as beyond and above us. Second, it describes a religion in which the outward form is a genuine and sincere expression of the inward state.

The divine spirit, revealing itself in the depths of the soul, is thought of as the source of religious and moral knowledge, a source of power to act according to that knowledge and a source of unity with others. Religious and moral knowledge, like the knowledge or appreciation of beauty, is not attained by a logical process of thought, but by feeling. As psychologists have already pointed out, feeling is as much an organ of knowledge as thought---it reveals values, rather than facts. Outward authorities, such as the Bible or the traditions of the church, are important, but secondary sources, of truth. They can be understood and applied only through the spirit which first produced them. Conscience, as the particular organ which discerns moral truth, is the true guide only in as far as man permits God to speak through it.