← catalogue

The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden · English · Gutenberg #41901 · 420,426 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Victorious Attitude
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Victorious Attitude

Author: Orison Swett Marden


        
Release date: January 23, 2013 [eBook #41901]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41901

Credits: Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE ***

  THE VICTORIOUS
  ATTITUDE

  BY

  ORISON SWETT MARDEN

  AUTHOR OF "PUSHING TO THE FRONT," "PEACE, POWER
  AND PLENTY," "THE MIRACLE OF RIGHT THOUGHT,"
  "KEEPING FIT," "WOMAN AND HOME," ETC.


  _To think you can, creates the force that can._


  NEW YORK
  THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  COPYRIGHT, 1916
  BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY

  Sixteenth Thousand




  [Illustration: Orison S. Marden]




  TO
  MY FRIEND
  CHARLES M. SCHWAB




TABLE OF CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                               PAGE
     I  THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE                            1
    II  "ACCORDING TO THY FAITH"                          17
   III  DOUBT THE TRAITOR                                 41
    IV  MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE                           62
     V  A NEW ROSARY                                      87
    VI  ATTRACTING THE POORHOUSE                         117
   VII  MAKING YOURSELF A PROSPERITY MAGNET              140
  VIII  THE SUGGESTION OF INFERIORITY                    163
    IX  HAVE YOU TRIED LOVE'S WAY?                       183
     X  WHERE YOUR SUPPLY IS                             217
    XI  THE TRIUMPH OF HEALTH IDEALS                     239
   XII  YOU ARE HEADED TOWARD YOUR IDEAL                 268
  XIII  HOW TO MAKE THE BRAIN WORK FOR US DURING SLEEP   286
   XIV  PREPARING THE MIND FOR SLEEP                     303
    XV  HOW TO STAY YOUNG                                318
   XVI  OUR ONENESS WITH INFINITE LIFE                   343




THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE




CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE

      Go boldly; go serenely, go augustly;
        Who can withstand thee then!
                                                   BROWNING.

    What a grasp the mind would have if we could always hold the
    victorious attitude toward everything! Sweeping past obstacles
    and reaching out into the energy of the universe it would gather
    to itself material for building a life in its own image.


To be a conqueror in appearance, in one's bearing, is the first step
toward success. It inspires confidence in others as well as in oneself.
Walk, talk and act as though you were a somebody, and you are more
likely to become such. Move about among your fellowmen as though you
believe you are a man of importance. Let victory speak from your face
and express itself in your manner. Carry yourself like one who is
conscious he has a splendid mission, a grand aim in life. Radiate a
hopeful, expectant, cheerful atmosphere. In other words, be a good
advertisement of the winner you are trying to be.

Doubts, fears, despondency, lack of confidence, will not only give you
away in the estimation of others and brand you as a weakling, a probable
failure, but they will react upon your mentality and destroy your
self-confidence, your initiative, your efficiency. They are telltales,
proclaiming to every one you meet that you are losing out in the game of
life. A triumphant expression inspires trust, makes a favorable
impression. A despondent, discouraged expression creates distrust, makes
an unfavorable impression.

If you don't look cheerful and appear and act like a winner nobody will
want you. Every man will turn a deaf ear to your plea for work. No
matter if you are jobless and have been out of work for a long time you
must keep up a winning appearance, a victorious attitude, or you will
lose the very thing you are after. The world has little use for whiners,
or long-faced failures.

It is difficult to get very far away from people's estimate of us. A
bad first impression often creates a prejudice that it is impossible
afterwards wholly to remove. Hence the importance of always radiating a
cheerful, uplifting atmosphere, an atmosphere that will be a
commendation instead of a condemnation. Not that we should deceive by
trying to appear what we are not, but we should always keep our best
side out, not our second best or our worst. Our personal appearance is
our show window where we insert what we have for sale, and we are judged
by what we put there.

The victorious idea of life, not its failure side, its disappointed
side; the triumphant, not the thwarted-ambition side, is the thing to
keep ever uppermost in the mind, for it is this that will lead you to
the light. You must give the impression that you are a success, or that
you have qualities that will make you successful, that you are making
good, or no recommendation or testimonial however strong will counteract
the unfavorable impression you make.

So much of our progress in life depends upon our reputation, upon making
a favorable impression upon others, that it is of the utmost importance
to cultivate mental forcefulness. It is the mind that colors the
personality, gives it its tone and character. If we cultivate will
power, decision, positive instead of negative thinking, we cannot help
making an impression of masterfulness, and everybody knows that this is
the qualification that does things. It is masterfulness, force, that
achieves results, and if we do not express it in our appearance people
will not have confidence in our achieving ability. They may think that
we can sell goods behind a counter, work under orders, carry out some
mechanical routine with faithfulness and precision, but they will not
think we are fitted for leadership, that we can command resources to
meet possible crises or big emergencies.

Never say or do anything which will show the earmarks of a weakling, of
a nobody, of a failure. Never permit yourself to assume a
poverty-stricken attitude. Never show the world a gloomy, pessimistic
face, which is an admission that life has been a disappointment to you
instead of a glorious triumph. Never admit by your speech, your
appearance, your gait, your manner, that there is anything wrong with
you. Hold up your head. Walk erect. Look everybody in the face. No
matter how poor you may be, or how shabby your clothes, whether you are
jobless, homeless, friendless even, show the world that you respect
yourself, that you believe in yourself, and that, no matter how hard the
way, you are marching on to victory. Show by your expression that you
can think and plan for yourself, that you have a forceful mentality.

The victorious, triumphant attitude will put you in command of resources
which a timid, self-depreciating, failure attitude will drive from you.

This was well illustrated by a visitor to the Athenæum Library in
Boston. Ignorant of the fact that members only were entitled to its
special privileges, this visitor entered the place with a confident
bearing, seated herself in a comfortable window seat, and spent a
delightful morning reading and writing letters. In the evening she
called on a friend and in the course of conversation, referred to her
morning at the Athenæum.

"Why, I didn't know you were a member!" exclaimed the friend.

"A member! No," said the lady. "I am not a member. But what difference
does that make?"

The friend, who held an Athenæum card of membership, smiled and replied:

"Only this, that none but members are supposed to enjoy the privileges
of which you availed yourself this morning!"

Our manner and our appearance are determined by our mental outlook. If
we see only failure ahead we will act and look like failures. We have
already failed. If we expect success, see it waiting for us a little bit
up the road, we will act and look like successes. We have already
succeeded. The failure attitude loses; the victorious attitude wins.

Had the lady in Boston had any doubt of her right to enter the Athenæum
and freely to use all its conveniences, her manner would have betrayed
it. The library attendants would have noticed it at once, and have asked
her to show her card of membership. But her assured air gave the
impression that she was a member. Her victorious attitude dominated the
situation, and put her in command of resources which otherwise she could
not have controlled.

The spirit in which you face your work, in which you grapple with a
difficulty, the spirit in which you meet your problem, whether you
approach it like a conqueror, with courage, a vigorous resolution, with
firmness, or with timidity, doubt, fear, will determine whether your
career will be one grand victory or a complete failure.

It is a great thing so to carry yourself wherever you go that when
people see you coming they will say to themselves, "Here comes a winner!
Here is a man who dominates everything he touches."

Thinking of yourself as habitually lucky will tend to make you so, just
as thinking of yourself as habitually unlucky and always talking about
your failures and your cruel fate will tend to make you unlucky. The
attitude of mind which your thoughts and convictions produce is a real
force which builds or tears down. The habit of always seeing yourself as
a fortunate individual, the feeling grateful just for being alive, for
being allowed to live on this beautiful earth and to have a chance to
make good will put your mind in a creative, producing attitude.

We should all go through life as though we were sent here with a sublime
mission to lift, to help, to boost, and not to depress and discourage,
and so discredit the plan of the Creator. Our conduct should show that
we are on this earth to play a magnificent part in life's drama, to make
a splendid contribution to humanity.

The majority of people seem to take it for granted that life is a great
gambling game in which the odds are heavily against them. This
conviction colors their whole attitude, and is responsible for
innumerable failures.

In the betting machines used by horse racing gamblers the bettors make
the odds. If, for example, five hundred persons bet on a certain horse,
and a hundred bet on another, then the first horse automatically becomes
a five to one choice, and the odds in favor of his winning are five to
one. In the game of life most of us start out by putting the odds on our
failure.

In horse race gambling the judgment that forms the basis of belief as to
the winning horse has a comparatively secure foundation in a knowledge
of the qualifications of the different racers. In life gambling it is
merely the unsupported opinion or viewpoint of the individual that puts
the odds against himself. The majority of people look on the probability
of their winning out in the life game in any distinctive way as highly
improbable. When they look around and see how comparatively few of the
multitudes of men and women in the world are winning they say to
themselves, "Why should I think that I have a greater percentage of
chance in my favor than others about me? These people have as much
ability as I have, perhaps more, and if they can do no more than grub
along from hand to mouth, of what use is it for me to struggle against
fate?"

When people believe and figure that they cannot, and therefore never
will, be successes, and conduct themselves according to their
conviction: when they take their places in life not as probable winners,
but as probable losers, is it any wonder that the odds are heavily
against them?

"Mad! Insane! Eccentric!" we say when some miserable recluse dies in
squalor and wretchedness,--"Starved," the coroner's inquest finds,
although bank books revealing large deposits, or else hoards of gold,
are discovered hidden away in nooks and crannies of the wretched miser's
quarters.

Are such persons, whom we call mad, insane, eccentric, who stint and
save, and hoard in the midst of plenty, refusing even to buy food to
keep them alive, any worse than those who face life in a
poverty-stricken, failure attitude, refusing to see and enjoy the
riches, the glories all around them? Is it any wonder that life is a
disappointment to them? Is it any wonder that they see only what they
look for, get only what they expect?

What would you think of an actor who was trying to play the part of a
great hero, but who insisted on assuming the attitude of a coward, and
thinking like one; who wore the expression of a man who did not believe
he could do the thing he had undertaken, who felt that he was out of
place, that he never was made to play the part he was attempting?
Naturally you would say the man never could succeed on the stage, and
that if he ever hoped to win success, the first thing he should do would
be to try to think himself the character, as well as to look the part,
he was trying to portray. That is just what the great actor does. He
flings himself with all his might into the rôle he is playing. He sees
himself as, and feels that he is actually, the character he is
impersonating. He lives the part he is playing on the stage, whether it
be that of a beggar or a hero. If he is playing the part of a hero he
acts like a hero, thinks and talks like a hero. His very manner radiates
heroism. And vice versa, if the part he takes is that of a beggar, he
dresses like one, thinks like one, bows, cringes and whines like a
beggar.

Now, if you are trying to be successful you must act like a successful
person, carry yourself like one, talk, act and think like a winner. You
must radiate victory wherever you go. You must maintain your attitude by
believing in the thing you are trying to do. If you persist in looking
and acting like a failure or a very mediocre or doubtful success, if you
keep telling everybody how unlucky you are, and that you do not believe
you will win out because success is only for a few, that the great
majority of people must be hewers of wood and drawers of water, you will
be about as much of a success as the actor who attempts to personate a
certain type of character while looking, thinking and acting exactly
like its opposite.

By a psychological law we attract that which corresponds with our mental
attitude, with our faith, our hopes, our expectations, or with our
doubts and fears. If this were fully understood, and used as a working
principle in life, we would have no poverty, no failures, no criminals,
no down-and-outs. We would not see people everywhere with expressions
which indicate that there is very little enjoyment in living; that it is
a serious question with them whether life is really worth while, whether
it really pays to struggle on in a miserable world where rewards are so
few and uncertain and pains and penalties so numerous and so certain.

Every boy, every girl should be taught to assume the victorious attitude
toward life. All through a youth's education the idea should be drilled
into him that he is intended to be a winner in life, that he is himself
a prince, a god in the making. From his cradle up he should be taught to
hold his head high, and to look on himself as a son of the King of
kings, destined for great things.

No child is properly reared and educated until he or she knows how to
lead a victorious life. This is what true education means--victory over
self, victory over conditions.

It always pains me to hear a youth who ought to be full of hope and high
promise express a doubt as to his future career. To hear him talk about
his possible failure sounds like treason to his Creator. Why, youth
itself is victory. Youth is a great prophecy, the forerunner of a superb
fulfillment. A young man or a young woman talking about failure is like
beauty talking about ugliness; like superb health dwelling upon weakness
and disease; like perfection dwelling upon imperfection. Youth means
victory, because everything in the life of the healthy boy or girl is
looking upward. There is no downgrade in normal youth; it is its nature
to climb, to look up. Its very atmosphere should breathe hope, superb
promise of the future.

If all children were reared with such a triumphant conception of life,
with such an unshakable belief in their heritage from God, that nothing
could discourage them, we would hear no talk of failure; we would soon
sight the millenium. If they were made to understand that there is only
one failure to be feared,--failure to make good, the failure of
character, the failure to keep growing, to ennoble and enrich one's
life,--this world would be a paradise.

Just think what would happen if all of the down-and-outs to-day, all of
the people who look upon themselves as failures or as dwarfs of what
they ought to be, could only get this victorious, this triumphant, idea
of life, if they could only once glimpse their own possibilities and
assume the triumphant attitude! They would never again be satisfied to
grovel. If they once got a glimpse of their divinity, once saw
themselves in the sublime robes of their power, they never again would
be satisfied with the rags of their poverty.

But instead of trying to improve their condition, to get away from their
failure, poverty-stricken atmosphere, they cling the more closely to it
and sink deeper and deeper in the quagmire of their own making.
Everywhere we find whining, miserable people grumbling at everything,
complaining that "life is not worth living," that "the game is not worth
the candle," that "life is a cheat, a losing game."

Life is not a losing game. It is always victorious when properly played.
It is the players who are at fault. The great trouble with all failures
is that they were not started right. It was not drilled into the very
texture of their being in youth that what they would get out of life
must be created mentally first, and that inside the man, inside the
woman, is where the great creative processes of life are carried on.

That which man does with his hands is secondary. It is what he does with
his brain that counts. That is what starts things going. Some of us
never learn how to create with our minds. We depend too much upon
creating with our hands, or on other people to help us. We depend too
much on the things outside of us when the mainspring of life, the power
that moves the world of men and things, is inside of us.

There are times when we cannot see the way ahead, when we seem to be
completely enveloped in the fogs of discouragement, disappointment and
failure of our plans, but we can always do the thing that means
salvation for us, that is persistently, determinedly, everlastingly to
face towards our goal whether we can see it or not. This is our only
chance of overcoming our difficulties. If we turn about face, turn our
back on our goal, we are headed toward disaster.

No matter how many obstacles may block your path, or how dark the way,
if you look up, think up, and struggle up, you can't help succeeding.
Whatever you do for a living, whatever fortune or misfortune may come to
you, hold the victorious attitude and push ahead.

A captain might as well turn about his ship when he strikes a fog bank,
because he cannot see the way ahead of him, and still expect to make his
distant harbor, as for you to drop your victorious attitude and face the
other way just because you have run into a fog bank of disappointment or
failure. The only hope of the captain's reaching his destination is in
being true to the compass that guides him in the fog and darkness as
well as in the light. He may not see the way, but he can follow his
compass. That we also can do by holding the victorious attitude towards
life, the only attitude that can insure safety and bring us into port.




CHAPTER II

"ACCORDING TO THY FAITH"

      "Where there is Faith there is Love,
      Where there is Love there is Peace,
      Where there is Peace there is God,
      Where there is God there is no need."

    There is a divine voice within us which only speaks when every
    other voice is hushed,--only gives its message in the silence.


"I shall study law," said an ambitious youngster, "and those who are
already in the profession must take their chances!"

The divine self-confidence of youth, the unshaken faith that believes
all things possible, often makes cynics and world-weary people smile.
Yet it is the grandest, most helpful attribute of man, the finest gift
of the Creator to the race. If we could retain through life the faith of
ambitious, self-confident, untried youth, its unquestioning belief in
its ability to carve out its ideal in the actual, what wonders we should
all accomplish! Such faith would enable us literally to remove
mountains.

All through the Scriptures faith is emphasized as a tremendous power. It
was by faith that Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, through
the waters of the Red Sea, and through the wilderness. It was by faith
that Elijah, Isaiah, Daniel, and all of the great prophets performed
their miracles.

Faith was the great characteristic of Christ Himself. The word was
constantly on His lips, "According to thy faith be it unto thee." He
often referred to it as the measure of what we receive in life, also as
the great healer, the great restorer. Whenever He healed He laid the
entire emphasis upon the faith of the healer and the one healed. "Thy
faith hath made thee whole," "Believe only and she shall be made whole,"
"Thy faith hath saved thee." Or He reproved His disciples for the lack
of faith which prevented them from healing, as when He addresses them,
"O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you and
suffer you."

Faith believes; doubt fears. Faith creates; doubt destroys. Faith opens
the door to all things desirable in life; doubt closes them. Faith is an
arouser, an awakener of our creative forces. It opens the door of
ability and arouses creative energies. Faith is the link in the Great
Within which connects man with his Maker. It is the divine messenger
sent to guide men, blinded by doubt and sin. Our faith puts us in touch
with Infinite Power, opens the way to unbounded possibilities, limitless
resources. No one can rise higher than his faith. No one can do a
greater thing than he believes he can. The fact that a person believes
implicitly that he can do what may seem impossible to others, shows
there is something within him that has gotten a glimpse of power
sufficient to accomplish his purpose.

Men who have achieved great things could not account for their faith;
they could not tell why they had an unflinching belief that they could
do what they undertook. But the mere fact of such belief was evidence
that they had had a glimpse of interior resourcefulness, reserve power
and possibilities which would warrant that faith; and they have gone
ahead with implicit confidence that they would come out all right,
because this faith told them so. It told them so because it had been in
communication with something that was divine, that which had passed the
bounds of the limited and had veered into the limitless.

Men and women who have left their mark on the world have been implicit
followers of their faith when they could see no light; but their unseen
guide has led them through the wilderness of doubt and hardship into the
promised land.

When we begin to exercise self-faith, self-confidence, we are
stimulating and increasing the strength of the faculties which enable us
to do the thing we have set our heart on doing. Our faith causes us to
concentrate on our object, and thus develops power to accomplish it.
Faith tells us that we may proceed safely, even when our mental
faculties see no light or encouragement ahead. It is a divine leader
which never misdirects us. But we must always be sure that it is faith,
and not merely egotism or selfish desire that is urging us. There is a
great difference between the two, and no one who is true to himself can
possibly be deceived.

When we are doing right, when we are on the right track, our faith in
the divine order of things never wavers. It sustains in situations
which drive the self-centered egoist to despair. The man who does
not see the Designer behind the design everywhere, who does not
see the mighty Intelligence back of every created thing, cannot
have that sublime faith which buoys up the great achievers and
civilization-builders.

Our supreme aim should be to get the best from life, the best in the
highest sense that life has to give, and this we cannot do without
superb faith in the Infinite. What we accomplish will be large or small
according to the measure of this faith. It is the man who believes in
the one Source of All who believes most in himself; it is the man who
sees good in everything, who sees the divine in his fellow-man, who has
faith in everybody, who is the master man. The skeptic, the pessimist,
has no bulwark of faith, none of the divine enthusiasm that faith gives,
none of the zeal that carries the man of faith unscathed through the
most terrible trials.

Without confidence in the beneficence of the great universal plan we can
not have much confidence in ourselves. To get the best out of ourselves
we must believe that there is a current running heavenward, however
much our surroundings may seem to contradict this. We must believe that
the Creator will not be foiled in His plan, and that everything will
work together for good, however much wars and crime, poverty, suffering
and wretchedness all about us may seem to deny this.

The abiding faith in a Power which will bring things out right in the
end, which will harmonize discord, has always been strong in men and
women who have done great things in the world, especially in those who
have achieved grand results in spite of the most severe trials and
tribulations.

It takes sublime faith to enable a man to fight his way through
"insuperable" difficulties, to bear up under discouragements,
afflictions and seeming failure without losing heart; and it is just
such faith that has characterized every great soul that has ever made
good. Whatever other qualities they may have lacked, great characters
have always had sublime faith. They have believed in human nature. They
have believed in men. They have believed in the beneficent Intelligence
running through the universe.

Some of the most important reforms in history have been brought about by
very fragile, delicate men and women, not only without outside
encouragement, but in the teeth of the most determined opposition. They
have agitated and agitated, hoped and hoped, and struggled and
struggled, until victory came. No one could even attempt the herculean
tasks they accomplished without that instinctive, abiding faith in a
Power superior to their own,--a Power which would work in harmony with
honesty, with earnestness, with integrity of purpose, in a persistent
struggle for the right, but which would never sanction wrong.

Think of what the faith of St. Paul enabled him to do for the world!
Think of what Christ's little band of chosen disciples succeeded in
accomplishing in spite of the might of the Roman empire pitted against
them! The power of the greatest benefactors of the race came largely
from the inspiration of faith in their mission, their belief that they
were born to deliver a certain message to the world, that they were to
make an important contribution to civilization. Think of what the faith
of the inventor has done! It has kept him at his task, kept him nerved
and encouraged in the face of starvation, kept him at his work when his
family had gone back on him, when his neighbors had denounced him, and
called him insane. Think of what the faith of Columbus, of Luther, of
the Wesleys, has accomplished for mankind! It has ever been men with
indomitable faith that have moved the world. They have been the great
pioneers of progress.

An instinctive faith in the Divine Force which permeates the universe,
which is friendly to the right and antagonistic to the wrong, has ever
been the unseen helper that supported, encouraged, and stimulated men
and women to accomplish the "impossible," or that which to lower natures
seems beyond human capacity. It is this which sustains brave souls in
adversity and enables them to bear up, to believe and hope and struggle
on when everything seems to go against them. It is the same principle
which supported the martyr at the stake and enabled him to smile when
the flames were licking the flesh from his bones.

Faith has ever been the greatest power in civilization. It has built our
railroads, has revealed the secrets of nature to science, has led the
way to all our inventions and discoveries, and has brought success out
of the most inhospitable conditions and iron environments. In fact, we
owe everything that has been accomplished to faith, and yet when we come
to its practical application in our everyday affairs how few of us avail
ourselves of this tremendous force! The vast majority are looking for
some power outside to help, when we ourselves hold the key which has
ever unlocked, and ever will unlock, all barred doors to aspiring souls.

If people could only realize what a potent building, creative force
faith is, and would exercise it in their daily lives, we should have
very few paupers, very few failures, very few sickly, diseased or
criminal among us. If, by some magic, a strong, vigorous faith could be
injected into the men and women of the great failure army to-day, the
larger part of them would get out of this army and get into the army of
the successful.

It is not alone in our life work, or in great or special undertakings
that faith is necessary. We need it every moment of our lives, in
everything, great and small, that concerns us. It is just as necessary
to your health as it is to your success. To build up the faith habit,
faith in human nature, the habit of believing in yourself, in your
ability, of believing that you are sane, sound, and level headed, that
you have good judgment and good horse sense, that you are victory
organized and that you are going to attain your ambition, is to blaze a
path to success.

A man begins to deteriorate, to go toward failure, not when he loses all
of his material possessions, not when he fails in his undertakings, but
when he loses faith in himself, in his ability to make his dreams come
true.

When we remember that self-faith characterizes successful people, and
lack of it the mediocres and the failures, one would think that
everybody would cultivate this divine quality which by itself alone has
done so much for the individual and for the world.

The reason why faith works such marvels is that it is the leader of all
the other mental faculties. They will not proceed until faith goes
ahead. It is the basis of courage, of initiative, of enthusiasm. Much of
Napoleon's power and early success came from his tremendous faith in
his mission, the conviction that he was a man of destiny, that he was
born under a lucky star, born to conquer. Shorn of his mighty belief in
his star, stripped of the faith that he was born to rule, he would have
been no more of a power in human affairs than the dullest private in the
ranks of his army. When warned by his generals not to expose himself to
the enemy, he would reply that the bullet or the cannon had not been
cast which could kill Napoleon. This invincible belief in his destiny
added wonderfully to his natural powers.

It was her conviction that she was chosen of God to free France from its
enemies that made Joan of Arc, the simple, ignorant peasant girl of
Domrèmy, the saviour of her country. Her mighty faith in her divine
mission gave her a dignity and a miraculous force of character, a
positive genius, that made all the commanders of the French army obey
her as private soldiers obey their superior officers. Faith in herself
and in her mission transformed the peasant maiden into the greatest
military leader of her time.

There is no doubt that every human being comes to this earth with a
mission. We are not accidental puppets thrown off to be buffetted by
luck or chance or cruel fate. We are a part of the great universal plan.
We were made to fit into this plan, to play a definite part in it. We
come here with a message for humanity which no one else but ourselves
can deliver, and faith in our mission, the belief that we are important
factors in the great creative plan, that we are, in fact, co-creators
with God, will add wonderfully to the dignity and effectiveness of our
lives, will enable us to perform the "impossible."

If every child were brought up in the firm belief that he was made for
health, happiness, and success; if it were impressed on him that he
should never entertain a doubt of his power to attain them, as a man he
would be infinitely stronger in his powers of self-assertion and in his
self-confidence; and these qualities strengthen the ability, unify the
faculties, clarify the vision, and make the attainment of what the heart
yearns for a hundred per cent. more probable than if he had not been
thus reared.

A child's faith is instinctive, and if not tampered with, destroyed by
wrong training, would continue through life. We see this sort of
instinctive faith illustrated by the lower animals. Take the birds, or
the domestic hen, for example. See how patiently she sits on the eggs
week after week until the chickens are hatched. She cannot see the
chickens when she begins to sit, but her belief that they will come if
she does her part induces her to give up her liberty for weeks, and to
go sometimes for days without food, that she may keep the eggs at the
right temperature in order to produce the chickens.

The trouble with most of us is that we do not have sufficient faith in
the creative power of the vigorous determination to do a thing, in the
persistent endeavor backed by self--faith to accomplish what we desire.
We give up too easily under discouragement. We haven't sufficient
stamina and grit to push on under disheartening conditions. We want to
see clear through from the beginning to the end of whatever we
undertake. We refuse to have faith. Yet much of the time throughout life
we may have to work without any goal in sight, or at least without any
clear light to see it, but if the mental attitude is right we know that,
somehow, we shall attain our heart's desire. We have merely been shown a
program which we are capable of carrying out, a table of contents of our
capabilities, the signs of the corresponding realities, for faith is not
an idle dream, an illusive picture of the imagination. We have not been
mocked by ideals and aspirations, soul-yearnings and heart-longings for
the things which have no possible realities. Faith is not a cheat. There
is ability to match the faith.

There is something about devotion to one's inward vision, the intense
desire and concentrated effort to fulfill what we believe to be our
mission here, that has a solidifying influence upon the character, gives
poise and peace of mind and also helps us to realize our vision.

The probabilities are that the iceberg which sent the _Titanic_, with
sixteen hundred souls, to the bottom of the ocean did not even feel a
tremor at the shock. More than seven-eighths of its huge bulk was below
the water, deep down in the eternal calm of the sea, beyond the reach of
storm or tempest. Like the giant iceberg, faith reaches down into the
serene within of us, into the eternal calm of the soul. It is not
disturbed by the surface commotions. A life poised in faith rides
steadily, triumphantly, through the tempests and the hurricanes of
existence.

You will constantly be confronted with things which tend to destroy
faith in God and faith in yourself. There are many times in life when
about all we can do is to hold on to the hand of the Divine Guide until
we have run through the storm zone. We have to learn to turn away from
the heart-breaks of life and to face toward the light. We have to
disregard the criticisms and the discouragement of others, as well as
the assaults of fear and doubt, and press on to our goal.

If you go in business for yourself, if you are struggling to get an
education, if you are making desperate efforts to realize your ambition,
whatever it is, you will find plenty of pessimists who will predict your
failure. They will tell you that you never can build up a business
without a lot of capital and outside help in these times of terrific
competition, that you cannot work your way through college, that you
can never be whatever you are dreaming of and longing to be. You will
meet plenty of obstacles and much opposition, and it will take a very
stiff backbone, a lot of sand and grit to keep pushing on towards your
goal against great odds, but faith is more than a match for all these.
Nothing else will enable you to win out.

Remember it is not other people's faith in you but your faith in
yourself that counts most. It is a good thing to have other people's
good opinion, to have their confidence in us, their faith in the success
of our efforts, but it is not imperative. Our own is. No man ever gets
anywhere or does anything great in this world without faith in himself,
without a superb belief that he is on the right track, that he is doing
the thing he was made to do, that he is going to stick to it through
thick and thin to the end. It takes faith to look beyond obstacles, to
see the way over difficulties, to brave opposition and to allow nothing
to swerve us from our course.

You cannot keep any one from succeeding who has an unshakable faith in
his mission. You cannot crush the faith that wrestles with
difficulties, that never weakens under trials or afflictions, that
pushes on when everybody else turns back, that gets up with greater
determination every time it is knocked down.

In the sacred Confucian scriptures we are told that a very devoted
disciple of Confucius, on a pilgrimage to his master, was stopped on his
journey by a broad river. As he could not swim and could not procure a
boat, the zealous disciple resolved that he would walk on the water.
Believing that the necessity of seeing his master was most urgent, and
being filled with zeal in the performance of his mission, he boldly made
the attempt--and succeeded. The record of this miracle is supposed by
followers of Confucius to be just as authentic as the Bible account of
the walking of Christ on the water.

If, like this zealot, you have faith in your power to overcome
difficulties, nothing can keep you from your goal. If, like Joan of Arc,
you believe you are appointed by God to perform a certain work, it will
help you wonderfully to make good. It will dignify your life and your
efforts, and thus save you from a thousand temptations to waste your
time in frivolous pursuits. It will put a higher value upon your
importance to the world. To feel that you have a divine mission that no
one else can perform, that you came here with a sacred message for
mankind, and that it is up to you to deliver it will add a wonderful
motive for effectiveness in your life work. The consciousness that you
are keeping faith with your Creator and with yourself, that you are
keeping faith with your fellowmen and earning their respect and love,
that you are keeping faith with a splendid life purpose, with your
holiest vision, gives a satisfaction which nothing else can afford.

Cling to your faith no matter what happens. It is your best friend. Like
the magnetic needle on the ship's deck, which will find the north star,
no matter how dense the fog, how dark the night, or how threatening the
tempest, your faith, even though you cannot see, will find the way. It
sees the open road, beyond the mountain of difficulties which shuts out
the vision of the other faculties.

Some time ago, during one of our periodical business crises, some
newspapers made merry over a statement of President Wilson that the
condition of the United States, illustrated by the fact that eighty
thousand freight cars were at the time side-tracked along the lines of
one of our great railroads alone, could be changed by psychology. One of
these papers sarcastically suggested that if we should take a dose of
the psychology remedy and go to sleep somewhere in the misty, cloudy
lands of theory, and dream that those eighty thousand empty freight cars
were moving, we should see them move.

Now, in spite of newspaper skepticism, I believe that the psychology
remedy if applied in every financial, business, or other crisis would
prove absolutely effective. If all the people of this country would
persistently hold a mental attitude of faith in our prosperity, which is
the birthright of the inhabitants of this land of plenty; if they would
have faith that our vast resources would enable us to carry on business,
regardless of conditions in Europe or elsewhere, and if they would act
in accordance with their faith, there would be no idle freight cars, no
lack of work, no lack of money at any time.

It is the mental attitude of the people of the United States that
causes financial panics and recurrent "hard times." And there is
something dead wrong in a state of mind which produces periodical
crises, intervals of nationwide stagnation in a land with resources
great enough to make every one of its citizens rich, in a land where the
State of Texas alone could give every one of them a better living than
the majority get to-day.

Before we can make business conditions stable we must have faith in the
stability of our limitless wealth, in the opulence of the earth over
which the Creator has given us control. We have got to hold the
prosperous vision, to see better times with the mental eye, not dimly in
the future, but now, to have more faith in our Maker, in our nation, in
ourselves individually.

Why, if we analyze the matter, we will see that our unparalleled
national prosperity has been built up largely by psychology. Its
foundations had their root in the faith of our forefathers, in their
belief in our country's possibilities.

We all know that faith has preceded every achievement in the world's
history. The activities of the whole country to-day are based upon
psychology, upon the mental attitude, the faith, the hope, the
expectation of its inhabitants.

"Without a vision the people perish," and when our vision, our faith,
shrivels, when it is obscured or displaced by doubt, fear, anxiety, lack
of confidence, all our activities suffer accordingly.

With abundant crops, with a lowering death rate and increasing longevity
of our people, with constantly growing educational facilities, America
ought to register every day of every year a high water point of
prosperity. But when a large portion of the people lack faith in the
future, when, from time to time, uncertainty is in the air, when
everybody is doubting and fearing, waiting to see what is coming next,
of course business will stagnate. It will follow the prevailing mental
attitude, hesitate, waver, doubt, stand still like the idle freight
cars.

We are just beginning to see that faith is as much a real force as is
electricity. It is faith that removes mountains--mountains of
difficulty, of opposition, of doubt, of distrust. It clears the track
of all obstructions. It makes stepping stones of stumbling blocks. Faith
is the most powerful, the most sublime of human attributes. Without it
the bottom would drop out of civilization. It is the fundamental
principle of life. Faith is the basis of health, of success, of
happiness, of love itself. It believes in, hopes, trusts, clings to the
loved one in spite of all faults and sins. It is faith that heals, that
achieves, that hopes. The very feeling of harmony between ourselves and
our God, that which gives assurance, a sense of protection and of safety
which nothing else can give, is born of our faith in Him, in whom we
live and move and have our being.

We must realize and appreciate more and more our divinity, the fact that
we are made in the image of our Creator and that we must partake
consciously of His qualities. Then we will have more faith in our
powers. When we are conscious of having qualities like His we can rise
above apparent limitations, above hereditary weakness. It is all
preëminently a question of holding the right thought--the thought that
builds, the thought that creates, that produces, the thought that we
have within us unlimited possibilities, which can be realized. A sublime
self-faith is absolutely indispensable to all great achievement.

Let no one shake your faith in yourself. That is what brings you into
closest connection with God. It is your mainstay. There is no magic like
faith; it elevates, refines and multiplies the power of every other
faculty.

Whether we are starting out in life, or going downhill on the other
side, facing the transition we call death, faith is our bracer, the
trusty leader that will never fail to guide us to the home of our
heart's desire.

If you are filled with a great faith you will not fear, though you walk
through the valley of the shadow. Though the way may be dark faith will
lead you into the light. The Power that has sustained you every moment
of your existence, and without which you could not exist a fraction of a
second, will certainly not leave you in your greatest need.

If you bade your child jump into your arms, he would not hesitate even
though it was so dark that he could not see you. He would jump because
of his faith in you. He would know that he would be perfectly safe in
doing whatever you told him. Why should we fear to jump into the arms of
the Infinite when we come to death's door, which is only the entrance to
another life? Why should we fear to cross the valley that leads to the
new life when we know that our great Father-Mother-God is on the other
side waiting with outstretched arms to receive us?

  "I will not doubt; well anchored in the faith,
      Like some stanch ship, my soul braves every gale,
      So strong its courage that it will not fail
    To breast the mighty unknown sea of Death.
  Oh, may I cry when body parts with spirit,
  'I do not doubt,' so listening worlds may hear it,
                                  With my last breath."




CHAPTER III

DOUBT THE TRAITOR

    Faith is the torch that leads the way when the other faculties
    cannot see.

    It is doubting and facing the wrong way, facing toward the black,
    depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and paralyzes
    ambition.

    There is a divine current within us which would always flow
    Godward, always lead to our ultimate advantage, did we not
    obstruct it, or turn it aside by our doubts and fears.

    He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.

                                                          JAMES ALLEN.


When David Hume, the agnostic, was twitted with his inconsistency in
going to hear the orthodox Scotch minister, John Brown, preach, he
replied, "I don't believe all that he says, but _he_ does, and once a
week I like to hear a man who believes what he says."

If you utter a lie with the conviction that you are speaking the truth
people will believe what you say, whereas if you proclaim a truth in a
weak, hesitating voice, in a doubting manner, no one will believe you.
If you should take a tray of genuine gold pieces upon the street and try
to sell them, while showing by your very expression that you did not
believe in what you had for sale, you could not dispose of those gold
pieces for a tithe of their value. Nobody would believe either in their
genuineness or in your own. Your timid, doubting, hesitating manner
would queer all your chances of doing what you wanted to do.

I used to go trout fishing with two men, one of whom was always saying
that he never had any luck fishing, that he somehow didn't have the
knack, and never expected to catch many fish. This doubt totally
unfitted him for successful trout fishing. He didn't take enough
interest in the sport to study the habits and the haunts of the trout.
He did not know the likely places in streams and rivers to drop his
hook. He did not know the best kinds of bait to use. His doubt of his
ability led to indifference, and this made him a failure as a trout
fisher. The other man never had a doubt of success. If there were any
trout to be caught he felt sure he would catch them. For years he had
made a study of trout habits. He could tell which side of the big rocks
to cast his hook, and he knew how to cast it in a way that would tempt
the trout. Fishing in the same stream alongside the doubtful,
indifferent fisherman he would catch ten times as many fish.

If there is a great big doubt in your self-faith, if you have left a
bridge standing for your retreat in case of defeat, if you lack
clean-cut, firm decision, if there is any interrogation point in your
confidence in yourself, there will be a limp in your success gait, and
you will not be able to rise out of mediocrity.

Our worst enemies are not outside but inside of us. Every human being
harbors a traitor who is always on the watch to thwart his ambition, to
turn him aside from his aim. That traitor is doubt. You must make up
your mind at the very outset of your career that you will always be
followed about by certain mental enemies, mental traitors, which will
try to dissuade you from doing the highest or biggest thing possible to
you. Doubt is one of the most insistent of these, and will dog your
steps to your grave. The man or woman who is not strong enough to
resist its insidious attacks will never do what he or she is capable of
doing, and was sent into the world by the Creator to do.

The person who is always fearful of consequences, who is in doubt as to
the outcome of his acts, or whether he is really capable of doing what
he undertakes, will always be a weakling. No one who is not bigger than
his doubts can ever accomplish anything great or worth while, because
this subtle enemy kills initiative and self-confidence, and without
these dominant qualities no human being can measure up to his
possibilities.

But for doubt, which strangles the very beginning of things, initiative
instead of being so rare would be a common virtue among all classes.
Nine out of ten average individuals are held back from testing their
powers by the suggestions of doubt. If it were possible to drive from
the human mind this specter which stands at the door of our hopes, of
our resolution, which throws its baleful shadow across our vision,
civilization would forge ahead by leaps and bounds. This miserable
traitor, under the guise of a friend, is holding down millions of men
and women below the level of their powers, keeping them from beginning
things which they are capable of doing, but which doubt warns them at
their peril not to attempt.

Doubt is responsible for more suicides, more misery, more bankrupt
lives, more failures, than any other one thing. It makes more people
afraid to start out on a course they know they ought to pursue than any
other thing. Standing right at the gateway of our choice, at the parting
of the ways, when we have fully resolved to take the path that is best
for us, a hard and forbidding one compared with the easy way along the
line of least resistance, doubt calls a halt. It bids us pause and think
once more, asks us to look again at the rugged path we have chosen and
consider whether we really want to pay the price of our choice, to take
that turning when the other looks so much brighter and pleasanter and is
so very much easier.

This is the point of cleavage which marks the beginning of failure for
the timid soul who is not bigger than his doubt. The suggestions pushed
into his mind by his enemy make him hesitate. He is moved to "stop,
look, and listen." He begins to reconsider, to look again at the
obstacles ahead, and the longer he looks the bigger they grow. He
becomes frightened, fears he cannot do the thing that at first seemed
possible, and finally turns aside to the easier path of mediocrity and
commonness.

Doubt has killed more splendid projects, shattered more ambitious
schemes, strangled more effective genius, neutralized more superb
effort, blasted more fine intellects, thwarted more splendid ambitions
than any other enemy of the race.

Talk about drug victims and slaves of drink! Doubt has more victims than
even these terrible enemies of the race. We see them everywhere in
menial and lowly positions, perpetual clerks, discontented drudges,
hewers of wood and drawers of water, paralyzed at the very gateway of
their career by that fatal trait which they have never learned how to
strangle, to neutralize with its opposites, faith, hope, confidence,
assurance.

How many thousands of employees plodding along in mediocrity to-day
could have been in business for themselves but for this great enemy
inside of them! How many splendid young men have been kept out of the
pulpit, how many superb lawyers, in possibility, have been strangled by
this traitor! How many men are to-day clerks, bookkeepers, or other
subordinates, who might have been managers, superintendents or
proprietors themselves but for the work of this damnable traitor!

When opportunity presented itself these doubters were afraid. They
waited for certainty. They dared not take chances. They did not realize
that opportunity is a maiden who admires the bold, courageous,
self-confident suitor. They did not wake up in time to the fact that she
will not trust herself to the timid, the hesitant, the over-cautious
suitor. When too late they realized that while the doubter is wavering
and hesitating, wondering if he dare try to win, the daring, intrepid
wooer steps in and wins.

The great prizes of life are for the courageous, the dauntless, the
self-confident. The timid, hesitating, vacillating man who listens to
his doubts and fears stops to make up his mind, and--the opportunity
has passed beyond his reach.

Doubt, uncertainty, or fear as to results, is the great discourager of
the human race. It is the dire enemy of all achievement. It tells the
poor boy and girl who long for an education that it is foolish for them
to think of going through school and college without money or without
somebody to help them. It tells them that there are many more poor boys
and girls in every school and college who are trying to pay their way
than will ever find opportunities to make their education available. It
is always whispering to them that there is a big waiting list of men and
women who were graduated years ago everywhere looking and waiting,
trying in vain to get something to do to earn back the amount they spent
on their education.

No matter what you attempt to do, what new enterprise you may undertake,
what progressive plans you may make, the traitor doubt will bob up and
call a halt, will try to dissuade you from your purpose. It will suggest
to you how many others have undertaken similar things and have gone to
the wall, have failed to accomplish what they expected. It will tell
you that you had better go slow, that it is foolish to go into business
in times like these, that you should wait until you are better prepared,
until you have more capital; in short, that there are stumbling blocks
in the way, and that you must consider the step very carefully before
you venture to decide.

It does not matter what we plan to do, doubt is always there ready to
knock our resolutions, and, if possible, to discourage us even from
attempting to put our plans in execution. Who could ever estimate how
many superb inventions and discoveries, which would have helped
emancipate the race from drudgery and hard conditions, have been
side-tracked by this traitor!

Doubt kills activity, discourages ambition and destroys or neutralizes
the biggest brain power. It would make a pigmy of a Webster. By filling
his mind full of doubt of his own creative power, a hypnotist could make
a Shakespeare believe he was a fool. He could inject a doubt into the
mind of a Napoleon that would cut his genius down to the mediocrity of a
common soldier.

This arch traitor of mankind is so closely related to fear that it is
almost impossible to draw a dividing line between the two. They are
twins. Wherever doubt can get a foothold it introduces its brother fear,
and fear brings with it all of its relatives, worry, anxiety,
discouragement--the whole failure family. A single day of doubts, of
fears, of unbeliefs, of the crime of self-depreciation, will drive away
from a man all that he has attracted to himself in many months.

There are multitudes of people to-day suffering from the fatal disease
of self-depreciation, the seeds of which were implanted in them by
doubt. All the victims of discouragement, those who are suffering from
despondency, those who are going through life disheartened, hopeless,
despairing, are the authors of their own misery. They persist in killing
the very thing they are pursuing, in queering their own quest by the
poison of doubt.

The doubting Thomases never get anywhere, because they have no vision,
and "without a vision the people perish." The man who would do anything
worth while in this world must have a vision, and he must have courage
to match it. Courage is the great leader in the mental realm. Whatever
paralyzes it strangles the initiative, kills the ability to do things.
Doubt is its greatest enemy. It suggests caution at the very moment when
everything depends on boldness. If a general were to be over-cautious,
to wait for absolute certainty in regard to results before putting his
plan of campaign into action, he would never win a battle.

Caution is an admirable trait, but when carried to excess it ceases to
be a virtue and comes perilously near being a vice. It may render
ineffective many noble qualities. There are a great many people who seem
to be courageous enough, but an excessive development of caution holds
everything in abeyance to wait for certainty. I know men who wait and
wait, never daring to undertake anything where there is risk, even
though their judgment tells them they ought to go ahead.

We are creatures of habit, and the constant raising of doubts in our
minds as to our ability to do what we want to do in time becomes a habit
of thinking we can't, and when we think we can't, we can't. When a man
begins to listen to his doubts he is beginning to weaken.

Why delay beginning the thing that you know perfectly well you ought to
do? What are you afraid of? Failure, even, in an honorable attempt, is
preferable to forever postponing the thing that you ought to do. Is it
the additional responsibility you shrink from, the extra work? Do you
have a horror of possible failure? Do you shrink from the possible
humiliation of losing out in your venture? What is it that enlarges your
doubt and holds you back? Some handicap, some invisible thread? Are you
carrying a great excess of baggage, clinging to unnecessary things which
handicap you?

I have heard of a sailor who lost his life in that way. He was one of
the crew of a ship that was carrying a large quantity of gold nuggets to
a distant port. The ship ran upon a rock, and, when all hope of saving
her or her precious cargo was gone, the captain ordered everybody to
leave the sinking ship. The last boat was ready to push off, but this
sailor refused to get into it until he had loaded himself with gold
nuggets. He said he had been a poor man all his life, and now he was
going to be rich at last. He would take away with him just as much of
the sinking wealth as he could carry. Heedless of the warning of the
captain and his companions that they would not wait for him, he loaded
himself with gold. Then, the boats having pushed away, he jumped
overboard and tried to save himself by clinging to pieces of the wreck.
But, owing to the weight he carried, he could neither float nor swim,
and so the wealth he felt he could not leave behind carried him down to
death.

Your doubt of your success is probably your biggest handicap. But it
would be a thousand times better to make mistakes by forging ahead too
rapidly, by undertaking more than we can carry out, than to be forever
hovering upon the edge of doubt, delaying, postponing, waiting for
certainty, until we become slaves of a habit which we cannot break. And
remember that the habit of putting off, of waiting to see how things are
going to turn out, to see if something more certain, something with less
of risk, will not turn up, is fatal to initiative, fatal to leadership,
fatal to efficiency.

I know a man who has been resolving for a quarter of a century to start
something in which he thoroughly believes. Every year during that long
period he has told me that this was the year for him to start. He was
really going to begin his great life work, but doubt has engendered the
putting off habit, and this has such a grip upon him that he shrinks
from undertaking anything new. He seems to have a great fear of getting
out of his old rut, to try something different, a fear that things may
not work out right, that it is not the psychological moment to strike.
He has gray hairs now, the enthusiasm of youth is gone, and he never
will begin to do the thing which everybody who knows him believes he is
perfectly capable of doing.

All history shows that while experience increases wisdom, it does not
always increase faith. The inexperienced youth will often undertake
things which stagger the older and more experienced. Confidence is
characteristic of youth; but after a few setbacks and disappointments,
many begin to wonder whether, after all, their first confidence was
based upon good judgment, whether their enthusiasm and faith were not
the result of lack of experience, and then they begin to doubt and to
fear that this voice of ambition which is ever beckoning them on and
upward is not reliable. They say to themselves: "What if this should be
merely a mirage to lure me on the rocks," and before they realize it
they are weaving doubts and fears and over-caution into a habit that has
ruined multitudes of careers, a habit that is responsible for a larger
percentage of unused ability, of locked-up powers than any other one
thing.

Have _you_ done the biggest thing you are capable of doing? Is it not
possible that there is something within you, some unworked mental
territory which, if cultivated, would lead you out into that wider field
you dreamed of when a youth? Why do you go on year after year in the
same old rut, expressing nothing, doing the same old thing in the same
old way because doubt whispers it would be rash to try new ways, new
ideas? How long have you been just an ordinary employee? Do you realize
that habit is getting a tremendous grip upon you, and that before you
realize it you may be a "perpetual clerk"?

The longer you remain in one position, doing the same thing without
promotion, the stronger the inertia habit will grip you, the bigger will
grow your doubt as to the wisdom of making a change. It is a dangerous
thing to get into a rut. Bestir yourself before it is too late and begin
to put into operation that plan which has so long haunted you, but which
doubt has been telling you is not feasible, is not practicable.

If every human being to-day were doing what he has at least some time
thoroughly believed he could do our whole civilization would be
revolutionized. What has been accomplished is but a tithe of what might
have been accomplished if every one had been true to his vision, had not
allowed it to be blotted out by doubt. If I believed in a real devil I
think it would be that unseen monitor, that mysterious something within
us which whispers doubt, which tells us to hold on, to be careful, to go
slow; which pulls us back when we are attempting to reach out, trying to
do the thing we long to do.

Are you not tired of having your plans thwarted, your efforts blighted
by the traitor, doubt? Has it not dwarfed your life long enough, has it
not kept you out of your own long enough by forcing you to live on the
husks when you might have had the kernel? Are you not about tired of
being defrauded by this thief of the blessings and the good things which
the Creator intended we all should have? Why not turn it out of your
mental house? Neutralize it with a great splendid faith in yourself, in
your mission, faith in your possible contribution to the world. Doubt
has very little influence with the Saint Paul type of man, with the
masterful type. It is only the weakling that doubt strangles, paralyzes.
Be a man and not a weakling, a mere apology of a man.

You know that the devil which has followed you through life, which has
blocked your progress, put out the lights in your path, tortured you and
undermined your confidence in yourself, has been the devil of doubt. It
has been the whispering fiend which told you that you could not do this
and you could not do that, which stepped in and killed your initiative
when you were about to begin to do that which your ambition had hoped to
accomplish.

Don't let this enemy thwart and baffle you any longer. Have a good heart
to heart talk with yourself and break the habit chain of unbelief in
self with which it has bound you. Say to yourself, "I will not listen
any longer to the voice of this fiend. I will not allow it to spoil
God's plan for me. There is something inside of me which insists that I
was planned for victory, not for defeat, for happiness, not for misery,
for peace of mind, not for a life of worry, anxiety, and fear. I do not
believe that I was placed here to be a mere puppet of circumstances.
Faith, hope and confidence are my helpers. Doubt is a child of fear, and
fear has the great majority of human beings hypnotized, so that they do
not dare to forge ahead, do not dare to undertake the things they are
perfectly capable of accomplishing. From henceforth it has no power over
me. I will not listen to its treacherous voice."

If you would succeed, you must avoid rashness as well as over-caution.
But when you have fully considered in all its bearings whatever project
you are about to undertake, and have decided on your course, don't let
any fears or doubts enter your mind. Commit yourself to your
undertaking, and don't look back to see if you could have done something
else, or started in some other way. Push on, and don't be afraid.

After we have launched out in an enterprise, have committed ourselves
before the world, pride steps into the situation and pushes us on
through hardships which would have discouraged and turned us aside
before we had fully committed ourselves. But when we have taken the
plunge, made the venture, we have practically said to the world, "Now,
watch me make good. I have made up my mind to put this thing through,
and I am not going to turn back." Our confidence grows as we advance and
then it is comparatively easy, even under difficulties, to keep forging
ahead.

Every child, every youth should be taught the danger of this fatal human
enemy, doubt. They should be so imbued with the philosophy of expecting
success instead of failure that doubt would never get sufficient grip on
them to strangle their capabilities and blight the fulfillment of their
dreams. If every child were reared with the conviction that he was born
for happiness, that it was intended he should realize his vision, his
mind would be turned towards the light, his whole mentality would be so
firmly set toward success and happiness that doubt could not get hold of
him. As it is the lives of multitudes of people are constantly filled
with doubts and fears and uncertainty in regard to the future. Young
impressionable minds are often stamped with the failure suggestion
before they are out of their teens. Most of us are born with the doubt
germ implanted in our brain.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country to-day who
have splendid ambitions, who have made resolutions to carry out those
ambitions, but who are cowering victims of doubt, which keeps them from
making a start. They are just waiting. They are unable to make a
beginning while this monster stands at the door of their resolution.
They are afraid to burn their bridges behind them, to commit themselves
to their purpose.

At the very outset of your career make up your mind that you are going
to be a conqueror in life, that you are going to be the king of your
mental realm, and not a slave to any treacherous enemy, that you will
choose the wisest course, no matter how forbidding or formidable the
difficulties in the way, that you will take the turning which points
toward the goal of your ambition, no matter who or what may bar your
onward path. Don't let doubt balk your efforts. Don't let it paralyze
your beginning and make you a pigmy so that you will not half try to
make good when you have a waiting giant in you. Confidence,
self-assurance, self-faith--these are the great friends which will kill
the traitor doubt.




CHAPTER IV

MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE

    "Every great soul of man has had its vision and pondered it, until
    the passion to make the dream come true has dominated his life."

      "You will be _what you will to be_;
        Let failure find its false content
        In that poor world 'environment,'
      But spirit scorns it, and is free.

       *       *       *       *       *

      "The human Will, that force unseen,
        The offspring of a deathless Soul,
        Can hew a way to any goal,
      Though walls of granite intervene."


Washington, in a letter written when he was but twelve years old, said:
"I shall marry a beautiful woman; I shall be one of the wealthiest men
in the land; I shall lead the army of my colony; I shall rule the nation
which I help to create."

General Grant, in his "Memoirs," says that as a boy at West Point, he
saw General Scott seated on his horse, reviewing the cadets, and
something within him said, "Ulysses, some day you will ride in his place
and be general of the army."

Every one knows how those boyish visions were realized by the mature
men.

The late J. Pierpont Morgan's fortune was built largely by the dynamic
forcefulness of his thought, of his mental visualizing, the nursing of
his youthful visions. He was a man of varied and æsthetic tastes, but he
concentrated upon finance and he became the world's master in its
science.

Ancient Greece concentrated on beauty and art, and she became the great
beauty model and art teacher of the world. The Roman Empire concentrated
upon power--and became mistress of the world. England concentrated on
the control of the seas and commerce, and she has become the ruler of
the seas and the greatest commercial nation in the world. We are a
nation of money-makers because Americans have concentrated largely upon
the dollar. They think in its terms; they dream dollars; they hate
poverty and they long for wealth.

Whatever an individual or a people concentrates upon it tends to get,
because concentration is just as much of a force as is electricity. The
youth who concentrates upon law, thinks law, dreams law, reads
everything he can get hold of relating to law, steals into courts,
listens to trials at every chance he gets, is sure to become a lawyer.

It is the same with any other vocation or art,--medicine, engineering,
literature, music; any of the arts or sciences. Those who concentrate
upon an idea, who continue to visualize their dreams, to nurse them, who
never lose sight of their goal, no matter how dark or forbidding the
way, get what they concentrate on. They make their minds powerful
magnets to attract the thing on which they have concentrated. Sooner or
later they realize their dreams.

What could have kept Ole Bull from becoming a master musician? Who or
what could keep back a boy who would brave his father's displeasure,
steal out of his bed at night, and go into the attic to play his "little
red violin," which haunted his dreams and would not let him sleep? What
could keep a Faraday or an Edison, whom no hardships frightened, from
realizing the wonderful visions of boyhood?

If you can concentrate your thought and hold it persistently, work with
it along the line of your greatest ambition, nothing can keep you from
its realization. But spasmodic concentration, spasmodic enthusiasm,
however intense, will peter out. Dreaming without effort will only waste
your power. It is holding your vision, together with persistent,
concentrated endeavor on the material plane, that wins.

There are thousands of devices in the patent office in Washington which
have never been of any use to the world, simply because the inventors
did not cling to their vision long enough to materialize it in
perfection. They became discouraged. They ceased their efforts. They let
their visions fade, and so became demagnetized and lost the power to
realize them. Other inventors have taken up many such "near" successes,
added the missing links in their completion and have made them real
successes.

"Get thy spindle and distaff ready, and God will send the flax," saith
the proverb. If we would only take God's promises to heart, and do our
necessary part for their fulfillment no one would be unsuccessful or
unhappy. If we were to send out our desires intensely; to visualize them
until our very mentalities vibrated with the things we long for, and to
work persistently in their direction, we would attract them.

Everywhere there are disappointed men and women who have soured on life
because they could not get what they longed for,--a musical or art
education, the necessary training for authorship, for law or medicine,
for engineering, or for some other vocation to which they felt they had
been called. They are struggling along in an uncongenial environment,
railing at the fate which has robbed them of their own. They feel that
life has cheated them, when the truth is they have cheated themselves.
They never got the spindle and distaff ready that would have drawn to
them the flax for the spinning of a happy and complete life web. They
did not insistently and persistently send out their desires and
longings; they did not nurse them and positively refuse to give them up;
above all, they did not put forth their best efforts for their
realization.

Three things we must do to make our dreams come true. Visualize our
desire. Concentrate on our vision. Work to bring it into the actual. The
implements necessary for this are inside of us, not outside. No matter
what the accidents of birth or fortune, there is only one force by which
we can fashion our life material--mind.

The bee and the snake draw material from the same plant. The one
transmutes it into deadly poison; the other into delicious honey. The
power that changes the stuff into a new substance is within the bee and
the snake.

Of two boys or two girls in the same wretched environment, one picks up
an education, trains himself or herself for place and power, while the
other grows up a nobody. It is all in the boy or the girl. Each has
similar material to work in. One transmutes it into gold; the other into
lead.

Two sailors force the same breeze to send their boats in opposite
directions. It is not the wind, but the set of the sail that determines
the port.

The power that makes our desire, our vision, a reality is not in our
environment or in any condition outside of us; it is within us.

There is some unseen, unknown, magnetic force developed by a
long-continued concentration of the mind upon a cherished desire that
draws to itself the reality which matches the desire. We cannot tell
just what this force is that brings the thing we long for out of the
cosmic ether and objectifies it, shapes it to correspond with our
longing. We only know that it exists. The cosmic ether everywhere
surrounding us is full of undreamed of potencies and the strong,
concentrated mind reaches out into this ether, this sea of intelligence,
attracts to it its own, and objectifies the desire.

All human achievements have been pulled out of the unseen by the brain,
through the mind reaching out and fashioning the wealth of material at
its disposal into the shapes which matched the wishes, the desires, of
the achievers.

All the great discoveries, great inventions, great deeds that have
lifted man up from his animal existence have been wrought out of the
actual by the perpetual thinking of and visualizing these things by
their authors. These grand characters clung to their vision, nursed it
until they became mighty magnets that attracted out of the universal
intelligence the realization of their dreams.

Most revolutionary inventions have evolved from a flash of thought. The
sewing machine, for example, started with a simple idea, which the
inventor held persistently in his mind until through his efforts the
idea materialized into the concrete reality. Elias Howe used to watch
his wife making garments, sewing, sewing far into the night, and it set
him thinking, questioning whether such drudgery was really necessary. As
he watched her busy needle fly back and forth, he began to wonder if
this same work which it took his wife so long to do could not be done
with less labor and in half the time by some sort of mechanical
contrivance. He kept nursing his idea, thinking what a splendid thing it
would be if some one could relieve millions of women from this toil,
which frequently had to be done at night after a day of hard work. He
began to experiment with crude devices, clinging to his vision through
poverty and the denunciation of friends, who thought the man must be
crazy to spend his time on "such a fool idea." But at last his vision
materialized into a marvelous reality, a perfected machine which has
emancipated the women of the world from infinite drudgery.

The idea of the telephone was flashed into the mind of Professor
Alexander Bell by the drawing of a string through a hole in the bottom
of a tin can, by means of which he found that the voice could be
transmitted. The idea took such complete possession of the inventor that
it robbed him of sleep and, for a time, made him poor. But nothing could
rob him of his vision or prevent him from struggling to work it out of
the visionary stage into the actual.

I lived near Professor Bell, in the next room, indeed, while he worked
on his invention. I saw much of his struggle with poverty, heard the
criticisms and denunciations of his friends, as he persisted in his
visionary work until the telephone became a reality,--a reality without
which modern business could not be conducted.

All of Edison's inventions, those of every inventor, have been wrought
out on the same principle that gave us the sewing machine and the
telephone. They all started in simple ideas, in dream visions which were
nursed and worked into actualities.

According to Darwin, the desire to ascend into the heavens preceded the
appearance and development of the eagle's wings. It is said our
different organs and functions have been developed from a sense of need
of them, just as the wings of the eagle developed from a desire to fly.

The brain cells grow in response to desire. Where there is no desire
there is no growth. The brain develops most in the direction of the
leading ambition, where the mental activities are the most pronounced.
The desire for a musical career, for instance, develops the musical
brain cells. Business ambition develops that part of the brain which has
to do with business, the cells which are brought into action in
executive management, in administering affairs, in money making.
Wherever we make our demand upon the brain by desire that part responds
in growth.

For years a poor country boy builds air castles of his future. He
visualizes the great mercantile establishment over which he is to
preside. The ridicule of his family and of young companions cannot daunt
him or blur the bright vision he sees away in the distance. He continues
to nurse his vision, and behold, out of the unknown, unexpected
resources come, and soon he finds himself an office boy in a great
mercantile house in the city of his dreams. He watches everything with
an eagle eye; he absorbs information and ideas; he is alert, active,
energetic, resourceful, and in a few months he is promoted, and then
again promoted. He attracts the attention of the head of the
establishment, who calls him into his private office, tells him that he
has had his eye on him for many months and that he believes he is the
youth he has been looking for to manage the business. He gives him a
little stock; the business prospers still further under his management,
and in a few years the new manager is made a full partner in the house
which he entered as an office boy. This is the flowering out of his
dream, the objectifying of his vision, the matching with reality his
youthful longings. His brain has been continually developing along the
line of his vision, drawing to him the material to make it real.

A poor girl, the daughter of humble people in Maine who thought that to
become a public singer was an unforgivable sin, could not in the
beginning see any possible way to realize the dreams she held in secret,
but she kept visualizing her dream, nursing her desire and doing the
only thing for its realization her parents would allow,--singing in a
little church choir. Gradually the way opened, and one step led to
another until the little Maine girl became the famous Madame Nordica,
one of the world's greatest singers.

No matter if you are a poor girl away back in the country, and see no
possible way of leaving your poor old father and mother in order to
prepare for your career, don't let go of your desire. Whether it be
music, art, literature, business or a profession, hold to it. No matter
how dark the outlook, keep on visualizing your desire and light and
opportunity will come to enable you to make it a reality. Whatever the
Creator has fitted you to do He will give you a chance to do, if you
cling to your vision and struggle as best you can for its attainment.

Think of the Lillian Nordicas, the Lucy Stones, the Louisa Alcotts, the
Mary Lyons, the Dr. Anna Howard Shaws, the thousands of women who were
hedged in just as you are, by poverty or forbidding circumstances of
some sort, yet succeeded in spite of everything in doing what they
desired to do, in being what they longed to be. Take heart and believe
that God has given you also "all implements divine to shape the way" to
your soul's desire.

If you are a boy on a farm and feel that you are a born engineer, yet
see no possible way to get a technical education, don't lose heart or
hope. Get what books you can on your specialty. Cling to your vision.
Push out in every direction that is possible to you. It may take years,
but if you are true to yourself your concentration on your desire, your
pushing toward it, will open a door into the light, and before you know
it you will be on the road to your goal.

The Washingtons, the Lincolns, the Faradays, the Edisons, the men who
have done most for their country and for humanity have had to struggle
as hard as you are struggling to attain their heart's desire. The
opportunities for boys and girls to bring out whatever the Creator has
implanted in them are ten to one to-day to what they were one hundred,
or fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. The great danger in our time is
not lack of chance or opportunity but of losing our vision, of letting
our ambition die.

Most of us instead of treating our desires seriously trifle with them as
though they were only to be played with, as though they never could be
realities. We do not believe in their divinity. We regard our heart
longings, our soul yearnings as fanciful vagaries, romances of the
imagination. Yet we know that every invention, every discovery or
achievement that has blessed the world began in a desire, in a longing
to produce or to do a certain thing, and that the persistent longing was
accompanied by a struggle to make the mental picture a reality.

It is difficult for us to grasp the fact that ambition, accompanied by
effort, is actually a creative power which tends to realize itself. Our
minds are like that of the doubting disciple, who would not believe that
his Lord had risen until he had actually thrust his finger into the
side which had been pierced by a cruel spear. Only the things that we
see seem real to us when, as a matter of fact, the most real things in
the world are the unseen.

We never doubt the existence of the force that brings the bud out of the
seed, the foliage and the flower out of the bud, the fruits, the
vegetables from the flower. It is invisible. We cannot sense it, but we
know that it is mightier than anything we see. No one can see or hear or
feel gravitation, or the forces which balance the earth and whirl it
with lightning speed through space, bringing it round its orbit without
a variation of the tenth of a second in a century, yet who can doubt
their reality? Does any one question the mighty power of electricity
because it cannot be seen or heard or smelled?

The potency of our desires, of our soul longings, when backed by the
effort to make them realities, is just as real as is that of any of the
unseen forces in Nature's great laboratory. The great cosmic ether is
packed with invisible potentialities. Whatever comes out of it to you
comes in response to your call. Everything you have accomplished in life
has been a result of a psychic law which, consciously or unconsciously,
you have obeyed.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that the way will not open because
you cannot now see any possible means of achieving that for which you
long. The very intensity of your longing for a certain career, to do a
certain thing, is the best evidence that you have the ability to match
it, and that this ability was given you for a purpose, even to play a
divine, a magnificent part in the great universal plan. The longing is
merely the forerunner of achievement. It is the seed that will germinate
if nurtured by effort.

If, however, you stop at sowing the seed you will get just about as much
harvest as a farmer would get if he should sow his seeds without
preparing the soil, without fertilizing or cultivating it or keeping
down the weeds. It is the blending of the practical with the ideal that
brings the harvest from the seed thought. You must keep on struggling
toward your ideal. No matter how black and forbidding the way ahead of
you, just imagine you are carrying a lantern which will advance with you
and give light enough for the next step. It is not necessary to see to
the end of the road. All the light you need is for the next step. Faith
in your vision and persistent endeavor will do the rest. There is no
doubt that if we do our part, the Divinity that has created us, given us
an appointed place and a work in the plan of the universe, will bring
things out better than we can plan or even imagine.

Send out your wishes, cherish your desires, force out your yearnings,
your heart longings with all the intensity and persistency you can
muster, and you will be surprised to see how soon they will begin to
attract their affinities, how they will grow and take tangible shape,
and ultimately become actual things. Fling out your desires into the
cosmic ether boldly, with the utmost confidence. Therein you will gather
the material which shall build into reality the castle of your dreams.

The trouble with us is that we are afraid to do this. We fear that fate
will mock us, cast back to us our mental visions empty of fruition. We
do not understand the laws governing our thought forces any more than we
understand the laws governing the universe. If we had faith in their
power, our earnest thoughts and efforts would germinate and bud and
flower just as does the tiny seed we put into the earth.

Think how the seed must be tended and nurtured before it will give forth
the new life. See how the delicate bud has to be coaxed by the sun and
air for many months before it pushes its head up through the tough sod
to the light. Suppose it were afraid to make the attempt and should say:
"It is impossible for me to get out of this dark earth. There is no
light here. I am so tender the slightest pressure will break me and stop
my growth forever. The only way out of my prison is to push up through
this tough sod, and it would take a tremendous force to do that. I would
be crushed, strangled, before I got half way through."

But the sun beckons, coaxes, encourages. The bud is moved into
attempting the "impossible," and behold, in a few days it rears its
tender head above what it considered the great enemy of its progress.
The dark sod, the very thing which it thought was going to make its
future impossible, becomes its support and strength. The very struggle
to get up through the soil has strengthened its fiber and fitted it to
cope with the elements above, with the storms it must meet.

Just like this tender plant, you may be hemmed in by seemingly
insurmountable obstacles; you may not see a ray of light through the sod
of hard, forbidding circumstances, but hold your vision and keep
pushing. In your struggle you will develop strength, you will find
sunshine and air, growth and life. You may be shut in by an uncongenial
occupation and tempted to lose heart and give up your dreams because you
can see no way to better yourself. This is just the time to cling to
them, and to insist that they shall come true. Without knowing it you
may be just in the middle of the sod, and if you keep pushing where you
are, in season and out of season, you will come to the sunlight and the
air, to freedom.

There is no human being who doesn't have some sort of a chance. If your
present position cramps you; if it does not give you room to express
yourself, you can make room by filling it to overflowing, by doing your
work as well as it can be done, by keeping your mind steadfastly fixed
on the ladder of your ascent. In your mind you make the stairs by which
you ascend or descend. Nobody else can do it for you. The master key
which will unlock that cruel door that keeps you back is not in the hand
of fate. You are fashioning it by your thoughts.

Your next step is right where you are, in the thing you are doing
to-day. The door to something better is always in the duty of the
moment. The spirit in which you do your work, the energy which you throw
into it, the determination with which you back up your ambition--these,
no matter what opposes, are the forces that unlock the door to something
better. If you hold to your vision and are honest, earnest and true,
there is nothing that can stand in the way of its realization.

I have never known a person who was dead-in-earnest in his efforts to
gain his heart's desire who has not finally reached his goal. No great,
insistent, persistent, honest longing backed by downright hard,
conscientious work ever comes back empty-handed.

Desire is at the bottom of every achievement. We are the product of our
desires. What we long for, strive for, the vision we nurse, is our
great life shaper, our character molder.

Very few can realize the close coördination which exists between their
visions, their mind pictures, and the actual accomplishments of their
career. If I were asked to name the principal cause of the majority of
failures in life I should say it was the failure to understand this, to
grasp the relation of thought to accomplishment. The gradual fading out
of one's dreams, the losing of one's vision, may be traced to this
cause.

When we first start out in life we are enthusiasts. Our vision is bright
and alluring, and we feel confident we are going to win out, that we
shall do something distinctive, something individual, unusual. But after
a few setbacks and failures we lose heart, and faith in our vision dies.
Then we gradually awaken to the fact that our ambition is beginning to
deteriorate. It is not quite as sharply defined as formerly. Our ideals
are a trifle dimmed, our longings a trifle less insistent. We try to
find reasons and excuses for our lagging efforts and waning enthusiasm.
We think it may be due to over-work; because we are tired and need a
rest, or because our health is not quite up to standard, and that by and
by our former intense desire to realize our dreams will return. But the
whole process is so insidious that before we realize it our fires, for
lack of fuel, are quite burned out. Our grip on our vision was not
strong enough. We did not half understand its mighty power, when firmly
and persistently kept in mind, to help us to our goal.

What we get out of life depends very largely on fidelity to our visions.
If we believe in them we will not let them die for lack of nursing. If
we really have ability to match them, and are not self-deceived by
egotism, petty vanity and conceit, no misfortunes, no failure of plans,
no discouragements, no obstacles, nothing in the world can separate us
from them. We will cling to them to our dying day.

The man who believes in his life vision, who is not a mere egotist or
idle dreamer, who sees in his desire a prophecy of something which he is
perfectly able to make come true,--he is the man who has ever made the
world move. He flings his life into his effort to match his vision with
its reality.

The world stands aside for such a one, for one who believes in his
vision, who consecrates himself without reserve to its fulfillment.
People know there is something back of the dreamer who has such faith in
his life dream that he will sacrifice everything to make it come true.

How much of a grip has your vision on you? Does it clutch you with a
force that nothing but death can relax, or does it hold you so lightly
that you are easily separated from it, discouraged from trying to make
it real?

Constant discouragements are a great temptation to abandon one's life
dreams, to drop one's standards. One's vision is apt to become blurred
in passing through great crises, in periods of general depression, in
times of financial stress, but this is really the test of a strong
character,--that he does not allow obstacles to divert him from his one
aim. The man who is made of the stuff that wins hangs on to his vision,
even to the point of starvation, for he knows that there is only one way
of bringing it down to earth, and that is by clinging to it through
storm and stress, in spite of every obstacle and discouragement.

Never mind what discouragements, misfortunes or failures come to you,
let nobody, no combination of unfortunate circumstances, destroy your
faith in your dream of what you believe you were made to do. Never mind
how the actual facts seem to contradict the results you are after. No
matter who may oppose you or how much others may abuse and condemn you,
cling to your vision, because it is sacred. It is the God-urge in you.
You have no right to allow it to fade or to become dim. Your final
success will be measured by your ability to cling to your vision through
discouragement. It will depend largely upon your stick-to-it-ive-ness,
your bull dog tenacity. If you shrink before criticism and opposition
you will demagnetize your mind and lose all the momentum which you have
gained in your previous endeavor. No matter how black or threatening the
outlook, keep working, keep visualizing your life dream, and some
unexpected way will surely open for its fulfillment.

Put out of your mind forever any thought that you can possibly fail in
reaching the goal of your longing. Set your face toward it; keep looking
steadfastly in the direction of your ambition, whatever it may be;
resolve never to recognize defeat, and you will by your mental attitude,
your resolution, create a tremendous force for the drawing of your own
to you. If you have the grit and stamina to stick, to persevere to the
end, if you persistently maintain the victorious attitude toward your
vision victory will crown your efforts.




CHAPTER V

A NEW ROSARY

    There is a great significance in that passage in St. Mark: "All
    the things whatsoever ye pray and ask for believe ye _have_
    received them and ye have." We are bidden to believe that what we
    wish _has already been fulfilled_; that if we take this attitude
    we shall obtain our desire.

    The benefit we derive from prayer is the harmonizing poising,
    balancing of our own mind, putting ourselves into closer communion
    into a more vital connection with the Divine Mind, through which
    we receive a larger supply of our Father's blessings.

    Prayer is the opening up of the pinched supply pipes of the mind
    which shut out the divine inflow; it is the letting into our lives
    greater abundance from the unlimited supply which continually
    flows from the Source of all sources.


"Mary," said a young girl to a Catholic friend, "why do you carry that
rosary everywhere, and what possible good does it do you to count those
beads over and over?"

"Oh," answered Mary, "I never could make you understand what a comfort
this rosary is to me. When I am tired out, or blue or discouraged about
anything; or when I long very much for something that it seems
impossible I should ever get, I take my rosary and begin to pray. Before
I have gone over half of its beads, everything is changed. The tired,
discouraged feeling is gone, or if I have been asking for something I
long to have, it doesn't seem nearly so far away as before; and I know
that if I don't get just what I ask for, I'll get something better."

Those who are too narrow-minded or too prejudiced to see anything good
in a creed which is not their own, often sneer at the Catholic custom of
"saying the rosary." To them it is only "superstition," "nonsense," to
repeat the same prayer over and over. These people do not understand the
philosophy as well as the religion underlying this beautiful old custom.
They do not know the power that inheres in the repetition of the spoken
word, and in the influence of the thought expressed.

Any one can prove this for himself or herself. It isn't necessary to get
a rosary made of beads. You can make your own, an intangible but very
real rosary, and if you say it over, not once, or twice a day, but over
and over many times, and especially before retiring at night, you will
be surprised at the wonderful results.

Is it a fault you wish to correct; is it a talent or gift you desire to
develop and improve; is it money, or friends, an education, success in
any enterprise; is it contentment, peace of mind, happiness, power to
serve, power in your work,--whatever it is you desire, make it a bead in
your rosary, pray for its accomplishment, think of it, work for its
fulfillment and your desire will materialize.

There are many ways of praying. All our prayers are not vocalized
petitions to the Almighty. They are also our inspirations, the
aspirations of the soul to be and to do. Desire is prayer. The sincerest
prayer may be the longing of the heart to cultivate a talent or talents,
or the intense desire to get an education so that one may be of greater
service in the world. That which we dream of and struggle to attain, our
efforts to make good; these are genuine prayers.

When Jane Addams, as a little girl, longed for the power to lift up
other little girls and make them happy; when she dreamed of a time when
she should be grown up and doing a great work in the service of
humanity, she was praying. She was even then laying the foundations of
Hull House, and the Hull House of to-day is an answered prayer. Her
whole life from childhood up was a prayer, because it was a preparation
for a great and noble work.

When the child, Frances Willard, longed and dreamed in her remote
Wisconsin home, she was praying and building as surely as in her later
years when she was the moving power of the great organization she had
brought into being. "I always wanted to react on the world about me to
my utmost ounce of power," she said in telling of her early life and
aspirations. "Lying on the prairie grass and lifting my hand toward the
sky, I used to say in my inmost spirit, 'What is it? What is the aim to
be, O God?'"

Such noble heart yearnings are, in the truest sense, prayers. The
uttered prayer clothed in beautiful language, that which is delivered in
the pulpit to be heard of men, may not be a real prayer at all. The
collective prayer of the congregation may be a mockery. I have often
been in churches where people were repeating prayers automatically,
while looking all about the auditorium watching other people, mentally
occupied, while their lips moved in a so-called prayer, in noticing what
they wore and how they looked. There is no real praying in such a
performance as this. It is not soul expression, not heart talking. It is
mere parrot talking. All mechanical mumbling of prayers in our church
services is an insult to the Creator, who does not hear prayers which do
not come from the heart.

"Prayer is the heart's sincere desire." What we long for and hope for we
pray for by our very longing and hope. The real prayer may be struggling
in the heart without words, it may be a noble desire, a heart longing
which no language can express. It may be voiceless or it may not, but
the true prayer always comes from the heart, and it is always answered.

A remarkable illustration of this is afforded in a story told by John
Wesley. He was once riding through a dark wood, carrying with him a
large sum of money intrusted to his safe keeping. All at once a sense of
fear came over him, and dismounting from his horse, he offered up a
prayer for protection. Years afterward Wesley was called to see a dying
man. This man told the preacher that at the time he had passed through
the wood, so many years before, he, the robber, had been lying in wait
to rob him of the money he carried. He told Wesley that he had noticed
him dismounting and how, on his remounting and resuming his journey, the
appearance of an armed attendant riding beside him had so filled him
with awe and a great fear that he had abandoned his purpose.

Balzac said truly: "When we are enabled to pray without weariness, with
love, with certainty, with intelligence, we will find ourselves in
instant accord with power, and like a mighty roaring wind, like a
thunderbolt, our will will cut its way through all things and share the
power of God."

Everybody prays, because everybody hopes and desires, has longings and
yearnings which he hopes will be realized. In a sense the atheist, the
agnostic, the unbeliever, although they may not know it, pray just as
much as do believers, for every longing of the heart, every noble
aspiration, is a prayer. We pray as naturally as we breathe, for the
desire for a better, nobler life, for grander and higher attainment, is
an unconscious prayer. Prayer is really our heart hunger for oneness
with the Divine, with the Eternal. It is the union of the soul with its
Maker. It is literally what Phillips Brooks described it to be, the
sluice gate between God and the soul.

Many people mistake the very nature of prayer, and complain that it is
no use to pray, because their prayers are never answered.

The reason is clear, and is admirably expressed in Irving Bacheller's
pithy verses on "Faith."

  "Now, don't expect too much o' God, it wouldn't be quite fair
  If fer anything ye wanted ye could only swap a prayer;
  I'd pray fer yours, an' you fer mine, an' Deacon Henry Hospur
  He wouldn't hev a thing t' do but lay abed an' prosper.

  "If all things come so easy, Bill, they'd hev but little worth,
  An' some one with a gift o' prayer 'u'd mebbe own the earth.
  It's the toil ye give t' git a thing--the sweat an' blood an' care--
  That makes the kind o' argument that ought to back yer prayer."

If your prayers come back to you unanswered it is because they are not
backed by the conditions on which the answer to prayer depends,--faith
and work. You don't get the thing you pray for either because you don't
really believe you will get it, or you don't back your prayer with the
necessary effort, or because you fail in both requisites.

To pray for a thing and not work for it, not strive and do our level
best to obtain it, is a mockery. To ask God to give us that which we
long for, but are too lazy to help get ourselves, is begging. In answer
to our prayers and longings and efforts we get that which we call out of
the universal supply, which is everywhere. Every day some prayer is made
visible, something is wrought out of the invisible, manifested in the
actual by those two mighty instruments--prayer and work. But if you
think your stumbling block will be removed, or your desire realized
without raising a finger to help yourself, you may pray until doomsday
without ever getting an answer. Prayer without faith is of no avail. And
faith without work is a barren virtue.

In the second stanza of a little poem entitled "God's Answer," Ella
Wheeler Wilcox gives us the answer to the plaint of the discouraged,
unsuccessful soul, who cries that his prayers are not heard, and that no
hand is stretched out to lead him to the heights he would attain.

  "Then answered God: 'Three things I gave to thee--
  Clear brain, brave will and strength of mind and heart,
  All implements divine to shape the way;
  Why shift the burden of the toil on Me?
  Till to the utmost he has done his part
  With all his might, let no man _dare_ to pray.'"

The answer to your prayers is right inside of yourself. They are
answered by your obeying the natural as well as the spiritual law of all
supply. If you don't do your part in the actual working world down to
the minutest detail your prayer is bound to come back to you unanswered.

Everything in the universe has its price, a perfectly legitimate one.
You can realize what you desire if you are willing to pay the price, and
that is honest, earnest, persistent effort to make it yours. The Creator
answers your prayer by fitting you to answer it yourself, by enabling
you to put into practice the law of demand and supply, the fundamental
principle on which answer to prayer is based. You must put yourself in
absolute harmony with the thing you pray for. It cannot be forced. You
must attract it. Answer to prayer comes only to a receptive mind in a
positive condition, that is, in a condition to create, to achieve.

The law of affirmation and the law of prayer are one and the same.
"Affirm that which you wish, work for it, and it will be manifest in
your life." Affirm it confidently, with the utmost faith, without any
doubt of what you affirm. Say to yourself, "I am that which I think I
am--and I can be nothing else." But if you affirm, "I am health; I am
prosperity; I am this or that," and do not believe it, you will not be
helped by affirmation. You must believe what you affirm; you must
constantly strive to be what you assert you are, or your affirmations
are but idle breath.

Make yourself a New Thought rosary, not of set formal prayers, but an
original one whose beads shall be your heart's aspirations, your desires
to e-volve the strong, radiant, successful happy man or woman the
Creator has in-volved in you.

If you are unhappy, crushed by repeated failures and disappointment,
suffering the pangs of thwarted ambition, put this bead in your rosary
and say it over to yourself frequently: "The being God made was never
intended for this sort of life. Mary (or John)," addressing yourself by
name, "God made you for success, not failure. He never made any one to
be a failure. You are perverting the great object of your existence by
giving way to discouragement, going about among your fellows with a
long, sad, dejected face, as though you were a misfit, as though there
were no place for you in this great glad world of abundance. You were
made to express gladness, to go through life with a victorious attitude,
like a conqueror. The image of God is in you; you must bring it out and
exhibit it to the world. Don't disgrace your Maker by violating His
image, by being anything but the magnificent man or woman He intended
you to be."

Back up every "bead," or prayer you put in your rosary by action during
the day, otherwise you might as well save yourself the trouble of
stringing your beads, for

  "It's the toil ye give t' get a thing--the sweat an' blood an' care--
  That makes the kind o' argument that ought to back yer prayer."

Don't be afraid of thinking too highly of yourself, not in the
egotistical sense, but because (the Creator having made you in His
image) you must have inherited divine qualities, omnipotent
possibilities. It is an insult to God to depreciate what He has made and
has pronounced good.

If you are a victim of timidity and self-depreciation, afraid to say
your soul is your own; if you creep about the world as though you
thought you were taking up room which belonged to somebody else; if you
shrink from responsibility, from everything which draws attention to
yourself; if you are bashful, timid, confused, tongue-tied, when you
ought to assert yourself, turn to your rosary and add another bead.

Say to yourself, "I am a child of the King of kings. I will no longer
suffer this cowardly timidity to rule me,--a prince of heaven. I am made
by the same Creator who has made all other human beings. They are my
brothers and sisters. There is no more reason why I should be afraid to
express what I feel or think before them than if they were in my own
family. I have just as much right on this earth as any potentate, as
much right to hold up my head and assert myself as any monarch. I am my
Father's heir, and have all the rights of a prince. I have inherited the
wealth of the universe. The earth and the stars and the sun are mine. I
will quit this everlasting self-depreciation, this self-effacement, this
cringing habit of forever appearing to apologize for being alive. It is
a crime against my Maker and myself. Henceforth I shall carry myself
like a prince. I will act like one, and will walk the earth as a
conqueror. I will let no opportunity pass to-day for assuming any
responsibility which will enlarge me, for expressing my opinion, for
asserting myself whenever and wherever necessary.

"This specter, this shadow of self-depreciation which has held me back
so long, which has darkened my path in life must go, for I shall walk
henceforth with my face toward the sun so that the shadows of life will
fall behind me, and not across my path as before. I am going to face
life with a self-respecting, victorious attitude, with a hopeful
outlook, for I know that I am victory organized. Hereafter I am going
to think more of myself. I am not going to put myself on the bargain
counter any longer by going around as though I had a skim milk opinion
of myself. No more of the poorhouse attitude of inferiority for me. I
know that I was born for victory, born to conquer. I am going to win out
in this great inspiring game of life."

If you feel that you lack initiative, if you are not a self-starter,
boldly assert the opposite and add the assertion to your rosary. Stoutly
affirm your ability to begin things, to do them as well as they can be
done, and to push them through to a complete finish. Learn to trust the
God in you. This trust is a divine force which will carry you through.
Never again allow yourself to harbor thoughts of your inferiority or
deficiency. Say to yourself, "I am going to assert my manhood or
womanhood and stand for something. I am going to be a force in the world
and not a weakling. I was made to make my life a masterpiece and not a
botch; I was created for a great end, and I am going to realize that
end. There are forces inside of me which if aroused and put into action
would revolutionize my life, and I am going to get control of them, to
use them. I am going to find myself and use a hundred per cent. instead
of a miserable little fraction of my ability."

If you are obsessed with the idea that you are not as bright, that you
have not as much ability as most other people; if you have been called
dull, dense, stupid by your parents and teachers, until you have lost
confidence in yourself; if you have been dwarfed by the suggestion of
inferiority, either through what others have said of you, or the thought
you have held of yourself, you must change all this. You must assert
your ability and hold tenaciously the ideal of the able, efficient man
or woman you long to be and that it is in you to become. You must not
only affirm your power to be that which you wish, but you must replace
the picture of your inferiority with the ideal of wholeness, of
completeness, of the man or woman the Creator intended you to be. Cling
to this ideal of yourself, assert your superiority, and you will soon
drive out the dwarfed, inferior, defective image which others, or your
own false thoughts, have established in your subconsciousness. Holding
the truth, the perfect ideal, in mind will give you confidence,
assurance to do the thing you are capable of doing.

Thousands of students have failed to pass examinations not because of
inability to answer test questions, but because of fear, loss of
self-confidence engendered by the blighting suggestion of inferiority.
This is especially true of highstrung, sensitive natures.

If you brood over the failure suggestion, if you visualize an inferior
picture of yourself, you will become obsessed with the failure idea,
with the thought of your inefficiency, and make it wellnigh impossible
for you to succeed in any undertaking. If for any reason you have
dropped into the failure habit, you will have to make a very determined
effort to break away from it, or your life will indeed be a failure.

I know a young man who is both efficient and ambitious, but when the
opportunity for which, perhaps, he has been working a long time comes,
he wilts. His courage fails and he does not feel equal to it. He can see
how somebody else can do the thing required, but he fears it is too much
for him. He has never done anything like it before; and he is afraid to
make the attempt because he might fail.

Now, if you feel this way about yourself, just add another bead to your
rosary. Cut "I can't" out of your vocabulary and substitute "I
can,"--for he can who thinks he can. Napoleon, one of the greatest
achievers the world has ever seen, hated the word "can't" and would
never use it if it could be avoided. He did not believe in the
"impossible." When he was praised for his daring and genius in crossing
the Alps in the dead of winter, he said, "I deserve no credit except for
refusing to believe those who said it could not be done."

Did you ever think that every time you say "I can't" you weaken your
confidence in yourself and your power to do things? Did you ever know a
person who has a great many "I cant's," and excuses in his vocabulary to
accomplish very much? Some people are always using the words, "Oh, I
can't do that;" "I can't afford this;" "I can't afford to go there;" "I
can't undertake such a hard task, let somebody else do that." These
negative assertions undermine power. Have nothing to do with them. In
all questions of achievement, let your rosary deal in affirmations.
Instead of "I can't," say "_I can_," "_I must_," "_I will_." Begin what
you fear to undertake, and half its difficulties will vanish.

If you are vexed, worried, and like Martha, "troubled about many
things;" if you are suffering from all sorts of discord; if you are not
feeling well, you will get great comfort from turning to your rosary and
repeating some of the blessed Biblical promises. "Neither shall any
plagues (discord or harm) come nigh thy dwelling. This is the promise to
him that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High. I will restore
health into thinking and I will heal thee of thy wounds." "He that
dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the
shadow of the Almighty," "The Lord is my refuge, my fortress. In Him
will I trust." "Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor for
the arrow that flieth by day," "Surely He shall deliver thee from the
snare of the fowler, from the pestilence that walketh in darkness," "He
shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou
trust."

The contemplation of God and the frequent repetition of these beautiful
Bible passages will increase your faith and your consciousness of
oneness with the Infinite.

Make it a rule never to affirm of your health, your success, or yourself
what you do not wish to be true. Don't say that you feel "rocky," that
you are used up, played out, that you feel miserable, that you don't
feel like doing anything. Never tell people of your aches and pains, for
every repetition means etching the black pictures of these conditions
deeper and deeper into your consciousness. Instead of thus intensifying
them, say to yourself, "The Power that created, and that sustains me
every instant of my life, repairs, renews, restores, cures me. I am
health, I am vigor, I am power, I am that which I think I am." Refuse to
see or to hold for an instant an imperfect, discordant sin or
disease-marred image of yourself. Do not harbor a suggestion of your
inferiority, physically or mentally. Always picture yourself as a great,
strong, splendid man or woman, clean, true, beautiful--a sublime
specimen of humanity. Do not allow yourself to harbor a thought of
physical or mental weakness. Think health, power, perfection at every
breath. Persist in holding the thought of yourself as you long to be,
the ideal which your Creator saw ahead of you when he fashioned you.
Cling to your vision of health without taint, weakness or defect.

Have you a hair-trigger temper, and do you fly all to pieces over the
least provocation, starting raging fires in your brain that are as
destructive to your mental and physical forces as are the great forest
fires to the vast tracts of territory over which they sweep? If you have
you are minimizing all your powers and seriously endangering your
success, your happiness, your life itself. Ask Sing Sing what the hot
tempers, the fires of uncontrolled anger, of jealous rage, of revenge,
of hate, of all the explosive passions have done. Ask the poorhouses,
the insane asylums, the morgues, ask the records of human wreckage
everywhere, what the fruits of uncontrolled passions of every sort are.

Anger, whatever its cause, is temporary insanity. Are you in the habit
of losing your temper, of flying into a rage over trifles? If you could
only see what a miserable spectacle, what a fool exhibition, you make of
yourself on such occasions, when you go all to pieces and rave like a
madman because you miss your train, or because you think some one
insults you, when you step down from the throne of your reason and let
the brute sit there and rule in your place, you would be so chagrined
and mortified that you would leave nothing undone to rid yourself of
your fault. Why, nothing could hire you, when in your right mind, to
make such a ludicrous and contemptible exhibition of yourself. You only
do it when under the stress of angry passion, when shorn of your power
by this temporary insanity.

To retain self-control, mental poise, equanimity, under all
provocations, great or small, is an index of a fine strong character. It
is a triumph of strength over weakness, of greatness over littleness.
The habit of conquering ourselves is the habit of victory; it
strengthens all the faculties.

You can bring this great force of control to your aid, by calling on the
divinity within you, by asserting your oneness with the Divine who is
eternal calmness. Say to yourself, "God's image is in me. I am of divine
lineage. I was not intended to be passion's slave. It is unworthy of a
real man, of a real woman, to be the plaything of temper, or any sort of
explosive tearing down passion. There is something divine in me and I
will not allow my lower nature to get control."

The constant affirmation of your oneness with your Creator, with _the_
One, will give you a wonderful sense of power, and will help you to
overcome every handicap. But you must be very positive, very insistent
and persistent in your affirmations. No matter what fault you are trying
to overcome or what good quality you are anxious to acquire there must
be no weakness, indecision or vacillation in your affirmations or your
efforts.

If you are cursed with the fatal habit of indecision; if you are a weak
vacillator, always taking things up for reconsideration because you are
not quite sure that you have done the right thing; if you allow yourself
to waver, to doubt the wisdom of your decision, you will be incapable of
ever under any circumstances arriving at an intelligent conclusion.

You can cure the curse of indecision by asserting your power to see
clearly, think quickly and act decisively. If you are in doubt as to
what career to choose; if you hesitate in regard to what course you
should take in any difficulty, which of two or three paths you should
follow, whatever your problem may be, ask for light and the divine power
within will come to your aid and guide you aright. Repeat the "I am" in
every instance. "I am positive." "I can decide vigorously, firmly,
finally." Resolve every morning that you will, during that day, decide
things without possibility of recall or reconsideration. First go over
the matter to be decided very thoroughly and carefully. In making your
decision use the best judgment at your command and then close the
incident. You will secure yourself against vacillation by refusing,
after it is thus closed, to wonder whether you have done the wisest
thing, by resisting every temptation to open the matter for
reconsideration.

If you feel that you are a coward somewhere in your nature, you can
strengthen this deficient faculty wonderfully by holding the courageous
ideal, by thinking and reading about heroic people and things, holding
the thought of fearlessness, that you are God's child, that you are not
afraid of anything on the earth. Study the stories of heroic lives;
think, act, live, the heroic thought. Say, "I am a son of God, and I was
never made to cower, to slink, to be afraid. Fear is not an attribute of
divinity. I am brave, courageous; I am a conqueror."

If you are suffering with the poverty disease, if your whole life has
been stunted by poverty, saturated with poverty-stricken thoughts and
convictions, if you have been heading towards the poverty goal, just
turn about face, and put the law of abundance into operation. Face
towards prosperity and success instead of poverty and failure. All the
good things you need are yours by inheritance. Claim them, expect them,
work for them, pray for them, and you will realize them in your life.
Make this last stanza of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's splendid little poem
"Assertion" a new bead on your rosary. Repeat it frequently, and work
cheerfully, confidently, courageously toward its fulfillment.

  "I am success. Though hungry, cold, ill-clad,
      I wander for a while. I smile and say,
      'It is but for a time--I shall be glad
      To-morrow, for good fortune comes my way.
  God is my father, He has wealth untold,
  His wealth is mine, health, happiness and gold.'"

If you have made fatal mistakes for which you have been ostracized from
society; if you are morbidly worrying over some unfortunate experience,
thus making it bigger, blacker and more hideous, just thrust it out of
your mind, bury it, forget it, say to it, "You have no power over me; I
will not allow you to destroy my peace and thwart my career; you are not
the truth of my being; the reality of me is divine, and you cannot touch
that. I can and I will rise above all my troubles, make good all my
mistakes and errors. From now on I will work with the God in me. I will
not be overcome. I will overcome."

If you are the slave of a demon habit which has blasted your hopes,
blighted your happiness, thwarted your ambition, cast its black shadow
across your whole life, say to yourself: "I will break away from this
vile habit. I will be free and not a slave."

If it is impurity, say, "I was not made to be dominated by such a
monstrous vice. God's image in me was not intended to wallow in this
filth. I have suffered long enough from this damnable habit, which is
undermining my health, killing my chances of success in life, and
lowering me below the level of the beast. I am a child of the Infinite,
sent here to make a worthy contribution to humanity, to make good. I am
going to make good. I am going to free myself from this base habit and
recover my self-respect, my manhood, at any cost. I am going to be a
MAN, not a THING, a son of God, not of the devil."

Continually flood your mind with purity thoughts and affirmations which
will neutralize your sensual desires. Repeat again and again your
determination not to allow your life to be spoiled by unrestrained
passion. Make such an emphatic and vigorous call upon your better self,
make the demand so appealing that your higher nature will be aroused and
will dominate your acts. Say, "The Creator has bidden me look up, not
down. He made me to climb, not to descend and wallow in the mire of
animalism."

If it is drink, opium, excessive smoking, or any other vicious habit
that is robbing you of manhood and holding you back in life, string this
bead on your rosary, "I was not made to be dominated by you, a mere
weed, an extract of grain, a habit which I forged. I am done with you
once and forever. The appetite for you is destroyed. There is something
divine within me which makes me perfectly able to overcome you. You are
a vile thing, and have disgraced me for the last time. Never again can
you humiliate me and make me despise myself. There can be only one ruler
in my mental kingdom and I propose to be that one. I don't propose to
allow you Whiskey, Cigarette, Opium, or other Drug or Devil, to ruin my
life, to force me to carry in my face the signs of my defeat, the
scarlet letter of my degradation, my failure. You have humiliated,
insulted me, tyrannized over me long enough, making me confess that I
hadn't enough strength of mind to stand up against a single vicious,
degrading habit. Now I defy you. Your power over me is at an end. The
spell is broken. Hereafter I am going to walk the earth as a conqueror,
a victor, not as a slave. I am going to front the world with my head up
and face forward. God and one make a majority. I am in the majority
NOW."

_There is no inferiority or depravity about the man God made._ No matter
how low you may have fallen, the God image in you never can be smirched
or depraved. It is as perfect in the worst criminal in the penitentiary
as it is in the greatest saint. There is something in every human being
that is incontaminable, something which is never sick, never diseased,
and which never sins. This is the God in us, and herein lies the hope of
the most brutal human being on the earth. There is something in him that
is divine, sinless, immortal, the God in him which when called will
instantly rush to his aid.

If you feel that you have wandered very far from your God, that you had
gotten out of the current which runs Heavenward, just repeat to yourself
such things as this, "Nearer My God to Thee, Nearer to Thee." This will
help you to put up your trolley pole, to make your connection with the
Divine wire which carries omnipotent power. The sense of separateness
will disappear and the load under which you staggered before will grow
light, will be lifted from you.

The secret of all health, prosperity, happiness, power, love, of
victorious living, is a consciousness of union, of oneness with the
Divine. This is the secret of all human blessedness. When you are in
this Godward current you are "nearer to God," and you cannot fear, for
you know that no harm can come to infinite power.

The closer we are to divinity, the greater our strength and efficiency.
What makes us weak and inefficient is that we have shut off this power
by our wrong thinking, vicious living. Your life will take on a new
meaning, a diviner dignity, when you consciously realize your
at-one-ment with the great creative, sustaining Principle of the
universe.

Nothing will be of more help to you in achieving this great result than
the constant daily use of your New Thought rosary. It will help you to
put further and further away the things that make you weak, that make
you think you are a mere puppet, at the mercy of a cruel Fate, which
tosses you about in the world regardless of your own birthright,
desires, and volition. You can make each bead a prayer, an affirmation,
to lead you closer and closer to the Source of all things. Whether it
be the overcoming of a vicious habit, the strengthening of some defect
or deficiency, the getting away from poverty and despair, whatever you
desire, you can repeat your affirmation concerning it, silently, if with
others, audibly when you are alone, until it becomes a part of you.
Especially repeat the beads of your rosary which fit your greatest needs
before retiring to sleep.

If you have been demagnetizing yourself, neutralizing your hopes, your
ambition and your efforts by your black, vicious outlook upon life, by
your doubts, and worries, your fear of poverty, of sickness, of
misfortune, of death, put these things out of your mind, and say, "God
is my helper. God is my supply, I cannot want. God is my shepherd, I
cannot lack. I must live in full realization of my oneness with Infinite
Life."

Each one of us is a part of the living God and we are powerful,
victorious and happy just in proportion as we realize our oneness with
Him, and weak, abject and miserable just in the degree we separate
ourselves from Him, the All-Source, the All-Supply.




CHAPTER VI

ATTRACTING THE POORHOUSE

    As long as you hold the poorhouse thought you are heading toward
    the poorhouse. A pinched, stingy thought means a pinched, stingy
    reply.

    No matter how hard one may work, if he constantly holds the
    poverty ideal, the poorhouse thought in his mind, he is driving
    away the very thing he is pursuing.

    The man who sows failure thoughts, poverty thoughts, can no more
    reap success, prosperity harvests, than a farmer can get a wheat
    crop from sowing thistles.


Poverty is a mental disease.

Some one has said that no one ever went to the poorhouse who did not
attract the poorhouse by his poorhouse mental attitude. Observation and
long study of the question have convinced me that, as a rule, people who
make miserable failures of their lives expected to do so. They had such
a horror of the poorhouse, they lived in such terror of coming to want,
that they shut off the very source of their supply. They had so warped
their minds that they could see nothing ahead but poverty. They wasted
the precious energy which might have been utilized in happiness and
prosperity building, in expecting, dreading and preparing for the dire
things that might come upon them, and, according to the law, they got
what they dreaded and feared.

Thinking war, talking war, anticipating it, getting ready for it, in
other words, preparedness for war, the perpetual war suggestion, was
largely responsible for the outbreak of the greatest war in history. If
all the nations involved had talked peace, thought peace, expected it,
prepared for it, there would have been peace, not war.

So long as people talk poverty, think poverty, expect it, get ready for
it, they will have poverty. Preparedness for poverty, expecting it,
attracts it, confirms poverty conditions.

We are constantly drawing to ourselves that which we expect. If you are
sending out a perpetual poverty thought current, a doubt current, a
discouragement current, no matter how hard you may be working in the
opposite direction, you will never get away from the current you set in
motion. The sort of thought current you generate will flow back to you.

Everywhere we see people trying hard to get on, struggling early and
late to better their condition, and yet never expecting, or even hoping
to be prosperous. They do not believe they are going to get what they
are working for, and they do not.

A typical example of those who keep themselves in the poverty current is
a woman I know who is constantly affirming her inability to better her
condition. She answers her better-off friends who tell her that she
ought to have this and that by saying, "Oh, it is all very well for you
rich folks to talk this way, but these things are not for me. We have
always been poor and I suppose we always shall be; we can only have the
bare necessities of life, and are fortunate if we get these. Of course I
might indulge in a little treat for myself and the children now and
then, but that would be extravagant, and I must save for a rainy day."

Now, I have no quarrel with people who save for a rainy day. It is the
part of prudence to be prepared for all emergencies. It is a splendid
thing to save for spending, for enjoyment in our later years, but people
who begin early to provide for the "rainy day," and who deny themselves
every little pleasure and enjoyment for the sake of adding to this
provision, fall into the habit of pinching themselves, and usually
continue to do so through life.

This woman limits her supply by her conviction that every cent she can
spare must go to the rainy day fund because she is always going to be
poor. She assures herself and others that she is never going to have the
things she would like to have, because of her poverty, and so she
starves the lives of herself and her boy and girl in anticipating a day
of possible want. She is a type of a multitude of men and women who
settle down to their poverty, become half reconciled to its limitations,
and do not make a strenuous effort to get away from it. That is, they
never dream of exercising their creative, positive thought, but continue
to live and to realize in their conditions the negative, destructive,
poverty thought.

These are the people who are always saying they "cannot afford" things.
They cannot afford to send the boy or girl to school or college this
year. They cannot afford the necessary clothes or the needed vacation
because of the rainy day, which, like a specter, rises at every feast,
on every occasion when they try to get some enjoyment or satisfaction
out of the present. They are always postponing things till next year.
But this "next year" never comes, and the children never go to the
academy or college, and they themselves never take the needed vacation,
the travel in one's own country or the long promised trip abroad. They
keep forever postponing the enjoyment of the good things of life until
they can "afford it;" and that time never comes for people of this
apprehensive habit of mind, because they always want to lay up a little
more for the future.

I know a number of people well along in years who are still pinching
themselves not only on the comforts but even on the necessities of life
in anticipation of the possible rainy day, for which they are always
planning. They make life one long continuous rainy day, and little
realize that they often tend to create the need for which they are
perpetually saving.

We sometimes read in newspapers striking illustrations of the results of
this starved, rainy day habit of mind. A New York daily recently
reported a typical instance; that of an aged woman who had died alone in
the slums of the metropolis. She had been dead several days when her
body was found, and so wretched were her surroundings, it was at first
supposed that she was penniless. On investigation, however, it was found
that the woman had had in ready cash and in bank deposits, almost ten
thousand dollars.

Pauperized by her diseased mind, this wretched creature, like many
another poverty-stricken soul, died of starvation in the midst of
plenty. Her mind was so obsessed with the poverty thought that she even
denied herself the necessities of life. For years she had shut herself
away from the great stream of life flowing all around her, so that she
might hoard, and hoard, and hoard. She would allow no one to enter her
rooms, and died alone and uncared for, leaving behind her the money
which would have made her comfortable, happy, useful, and would have
prolonged her life. She was as truly a victim of the poverty disease as
though she didn't have a cent.

The children of Israel while passing through the wilderness were
constantly reflecting the poverty thought,--"Can God furnish for us a
table in the wilderness? Of course not, it is not reasonable. We shall
starve if we do not get back to Egypt." But for the faith of their great
leader, Moses, in the Power that led them, they would have gone back to
Egypt, back to the slavery and poverty from which they had fled. Even
after the manna had been given them fresh every day for a long time,
they did not believe the supply would continue. They were still
skeptical and tried to store enough manna for "a rainy day," but it
would not keep and they were forced to trust to a new supply every day.

"But where is our supply coming from? How are we going to pay the rent,
the mortgage off the home, the farm? Where is the money coming from?
What will happen to us if we cannot get it? Where are the children's
clothes coming from? How are we going to get the necessaries of life?
Where is our supply coming from? Why can't I get a job that will enable
us to really live?" These are the questions multitudes of people all
over the world are asking themselves. They express the acuteness of the
suffering from the poverty disease, so apparent in every civilized
country.

Nothing else gives human beings so much anxiety, nothing else is such a
perpetual irritant as this fear of what is coming in the future, this
dread of poverty, of not being able to provide for the necessities and
the comforts of those dear to us, the fear of not being able to maintain
ourselves and to rear our children in comfort and respectability. It
demagnetizes us, drives away the things we want and draws to us those we
dread. Job said, "The thing I greatly feared has come upon me"--that
which I was afraid of has come to me. People who have an abnormal fear
of poverty attract the very condition they dread and are trying to get
away from, because the mind relates with whatever it dwells on. Our
doubts and hatreds and fears; the thing we relate with, we attract.

Whatever you allow your mind to dwell on, you are unconsciously
creating. If you think continually of misfortunes, of poverty; if you
fear you are going to fail in your work, that you may come to want; if
you are always thinking about the possibility of your business
declining; if you fear you are losing your grip on your trade or
profession, you are aggravating your trouble and making it worse and
worse. There are multitudes of people who never expect even to be
comfortable, to say nothing of having luxuries. They expect poverty,
hard times, and do not understand that this very expectancy increases
their magnetic power to attract what they do not want.

Not long ago a young man who was greatly depressed because he could not
get on in the world, asked me what I thought the trouble was. He said he
had always worked hard, but did not seem to make any headway. About all
he could do was to earn a bare living. Everything appeared to go against
him. Fate, he complained, seemed determined to keep him down, no matter
how hard he might struggle against it, and he was doomed to be poor, to
be a nobody. He believed that hard luck, poverty and failure were family
traits; for his father and grandfather, he said, were hard workers too,
but they could never get on, never get away from poverty, and he didn't
expect he ever would either.

Another, an older man, who sought my advice in a similar difficulty,
lamented the fearful inequality of human conditions, and railed against
his luck and the injustice of fate. "I work early and late, Sundays and
holidays," he said, "and haven't taken a vacation for years. I have been
struggling and striving and pushing to make my way in the world since I
was a boy, and here I am past fifty and have never succeeded in anything
yet. Now there is something wrong somewhere in society when such
persistence and such constant efforts do not enable one to get anywhere,
or to rise to any position worth while."

I asked him about his early training and education. He acknowledged that
he had not made much of a preparation for his life work, because, he
said, his father also had been a tremendous worker, had always tried
hard to better his condition but like himself had never succeeded, and
so he had come to the conclusion that success was not in the family, and
that it was no use to spend years in preparing for a career, for there
was no chance that very much would come to him anyway.

These two are types of people who are constantly heading toward poverty
and failure in their minds, and then complaining when they have got what
they invited. By the law of mental attraction they could not get
anything but poverty and failure. Each had desired success and
prosperity but had always expected the opposite. He had slaved and
toiled in an aimless sort of way, belittling himself and his talents,
with the inner belief that it was all he was good for anyway, and that
if success by any chance ever came his way it would be a stroke of luck,
and not because it was his due by inherent right.

No man can become prosperous as long as he holds in his mind the picture
of limitation, of lack and want. We do not get things in this world
which we do not believe we can get. We do not accomplish what we doubt
we can do, even though we have the ability to do it.

I knew a boy in college who always felt certain he was going to fail in
his examinations, and he did fail invariably. Yet it was due more to his
fear, his terror, of failure than to a lack of ability or preparation
in his studies. He had formed a habit of expecting failure, of
predicting misfortunes, of looking and preparing for them, and so far as
I know they have followed him through life.

In every community, in every occupation and profession, there are able,
conscientious men and women who try very hard, so far as their actual
labor is concerned, to get on in the world, but who don't expect to get
on. It is pitiful to see them toiling day after day, but always facing
in the wrong direction. They are working for success in their vocations,
working for a competence for themselves and their families, but all the
time expecting failure, anticipating poverty, living in an atmosphere of
mental penury.

There is no law of philosophy by which you can possibly produce just the
opposite of what you are holding in your mind, what you are
concentrating on. If you are thinking down, if you are afraid, are
worried, if you have fears and doubts, if you keep visualizing,
thinking, talking hard times, panics and financial crises, your business
will shrink and shrivel accordingly. If, on the other hand, you have
confidence, expectation of better things, if you are convinced that
conditions are going to improve, you set in motion a thought current
that will back your efforts with an irresistible force. But a thought
current saturated with the fear of failure, with doubts and
discouragement will neutralize your most strenuous efforts.

Instead of starting on their active careers with the victorious
attitude, with the idea that their careers are to be a triumphal march,
many, if not the majority of youths, begin with the impression that they
are not victory organized. This is because they have lived in a failure
atmosphere, and have absorbed the poverty idea. They have been reared
with the fear of failure in their minds, a dread of poverty, a terror of
coming to want.

Write it in your heart that a beneficent Creator, who planned a universe
full of good things for our use and enjoyment, never meant that we
should starve or be miserable. If we are unsuccessful, unhappy, it is
because of our attitude toward God and life. Most of us assume the
position of beggars instead of that of children of an all-powerful
Father, and we remain beggars to the end.

One of the worst things about being very poor is the danger of becoming
reconciled to penury, expecting it, holding the conviction that we shall
always be poor, that there is no help for it. The habit of thinking we
must remain poor because we are so is a paralyzing habit.

Whatever we have accustomed ourselves to for any length of time tends to
become a fixed mode of life. Multitudes of people have become so
accustomed to their poverty environment, so used to taking it for
granted that they are going to remain poor, that they do not take the
necessary steps to get away from poverty; and they do not even know that
the first step must be a mental one. Instead of this they are all the
time affirming their poverty, getting more and more deeply imbedded in
the poverty condition by their poverty thoughts and convictions.

The early years of multitudes of children are saturated with the poverty
suggestion. They breathe a poverty atmosphere. They hear poverty talk
perpetually. They acquire a poverty vocabulary. Their fathers and
mothers are always talking poverty, bemoaning their hard conditions,
complaining that they were born poor, and must die poor. Children reared
in such a mental environment get a sort of poverty habit from which it
is very difficult to get away.

The facing toward poverty and despair, heading toward hopelessness and
failure, is the worst thing about poverty. The fixity of their
conviction that they cannot get away from poverty, their resignation to
it, their firm belief that they can never rise into prosperity,--these
are the most distressing things about the very poor. There is a
tremendous difference between the prospects as well as the mental
attitude and the facial expression of a poor boy on a farm who dreams of
the day when he can go to college, who pictures himself there, who
believes with all his heart that his dream will be realized, and the
prospects, the mental attitude and face of another boy similarly
situated, who also longs for an education, but has abandoned all hope of
ever going to college, or ever getting away from the grinding drudgery
and monotony of the farm which he hates.

We must change our thought before we can change our conditions. The
thought always leads in any achievement. It would be as impossible for
the great mass of poor people to improve their position materially while
holding their present mental attitude, the persistent belief that they
are always going to be poor, and that they never can do what others have
done to get out of their rut, as it would be for the boy who longs to go
to college, but who has made up his mind that it is impossible, to get a
higher education. While they think that all others are lucky and they
are unlucky, while they continue talking about their hard fate and
thinking that the rich are getting all the good things of the world and
that they are getting only the dregs and never will get anything else,
why, of course they will never get anything else.

Most poor people have about the same attitude toward poverty that those
who are constantly ailing have toward health. Habitual invalids never
expect to be really well. They are always anticipating the development
of some disease, looking for the symptoms, imagining that they are going
to have this or that physical disability or disease. The way to have
health is to think it, to expect it, to visualize it, to realize that
health is a positive everlasting fact, and disease only negation, the
absence of health, which is brought about largely by a wrong mental
attitude, by self-thought poisoning, by disobeying the laws of health.
If we are going to be well, we must think vigorous, robust, cheerful,
health thoughts, and we must observe the laws of health. We shall have
the same degree of health that we give to our mental health model. It is
our visualizing of health that brings the expected condition. It is the
same with poverty.

Not long ago a poor man told me he would be perfectly satisfied if he
could be assured that he would never have to go to the poorhouse, that
he would have enough to provide the bare necessities for his little
family. He said he never expected to have anything better. He was
satisfied that it was not intended for him to have any luxuries. He had
always been a poor man, and he always expected to be poor.

Now, this is just the thing that kept this man poor, for he was a hard
worker. He always expected to be poor. He did not expect anything
better. He merely worked for the bare necessities of life, did not
expect anything else, and of course he only just managed to squeeze
along, making but a bare subsistence. This attitude of the poor toward
poverty tends to increase it, to aggravate their disease. So long as one
holds the poverty thought he is making himself a poverty magnet, and
continually drawing to himself unfortunate conditions.

We have a good illustration of this, a real object lesson, in the
grayhaired men everywhere seeking a job. I have watched these desperate
men on their rounds looking for work. They are poverty stricken in
appearance; their expression is one of utter hopelessness. They look
like men who are going downhill, men who have reached the period of
diminishing returns, and they feel exactly as they look. Their
appearance is the reflex of their thought. Their dress, their manner,
their gait, the look in their eyes, everything about them corresponds to
their mental attitude, and all point downgrade.

If these men would only brace up, look up, dress up, before they seek a
job, there would be some hope for them. If they can't get better clothes
they can brush the old ones, blacken their shoes, have a bath and shave,
and above all a mental clean-up, and their chances will be ten to one
compared with what they were before their physical and mental clean-up.

A man has got to radiate confidence in himself, the expectation of
success, before he can get a job. He has got to show that he has reserve
power, that there is a lot of good blood in him, working material,
success possibilities, or nobody will want him. The man who goes to an
employer in a discouraged attitude and begs for work on the ground that
he needs it very much; who whines and complains how hard it is for any
one who shows the signs of age to get a job, is not going to get one.

If you are in the clutches of a poverty so dire that it robs you even of
the desire to get away from it, you are cursed with self-thought
poisoning. This is what mars and embitters so many lives, drives away
happiness, health and prosperity.

Poverty is usually a disease. It is just as much a disease as is
smallpox or tuberculosis. It is just as abnormal to the human being as
any disease of the flesh. So is failure. Fear, worry, anxiety, these are
all mental diseases, from which few human beings seem to escape. But we
are gradually finding an antitoxin for the virus of those diseases so
fatal to efficiency, health, happiness and prosperity.

The Bible tells us "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." Every
investigator of slum life in our big cities, every record of the lives
of the unfortunate poor in our midst proves that this is an absolute
truth.

Extreme poverty is a scourge that draws its victims down from depths to
lower depths; that makes life a bitter struggle for the bare crumbs that
hold body and soul together. When these are not forthcoming it drives
the weak, despairing struggler to crime in order to keep himself from
starving, or if he is still too proud to steal, to beg, or to go to the
poorhouse he ends his life, rather than wait for the slow cruel process
of starvation to quench it out. Every year poverty claims its tens of
thousands of innocent victims among the little children who die of
disease and neglect in damp, foul cellars where the sun never enters.
It sweeps them into mills and factories where, robbed of the rights of
childhood, they become warped and twisted men and women, full of
bitterness, discontent, unrest and unsatisfied ambitions and longings.
It drives multitudes to crime, to insanity, to death. In short, poverty
is responsible for more ignorance and crime, more discontent and
unhappiness, more suicides and ruined ambitions, more wrecked hopes and
homes than almost anything else. Verily "the destruction of the poor is
their poverty."

If we are to progress as a race, as a civilization, we must,
emphatically, drive this crushing poverty disease from our midst.
Instead of lauding its blessings, as some do, it is our duty to get away
from it, and to help others to do so.

The poverty disease, the poverty curse, is not a decree of Providence.
It is largely the result of ignorance. Every human being on this earth
could be living in comfort if they knew the powers locked up in
themselves and were willing to work and make the best use of them. If
the poverty antidotes were as generally known as are the poison
antidotes there would be no poor people.

Human beings in the aggregate are in much the same position regarding
the poverty antitoxin as the medical profession in regard to newly
discovered antitoxin for some terrible disease. Physicians do not know
how to apply it safely and effectively, and until practice has
established its great value its use is limited. When the knowledge and
the use of the poverty remedy become general the disease will be
conquered.

As the race becomes more intelligent and better educated we eliminate a
multitude of conditions to which people formerly thought they were born,
and that there was no escape from them. Many evils which have been
conquered by science and education were at one time regarded as scourges
sent by God to punish us for our sins, to chasten us. Diseases which
struck terror to the hearts of human beings a hundred years ago, and
from which they fled in horror, are not feared at all to-day.
Intelligence and science have mastered the great plagues which in the
Middle and Dark Ages carried off their terrified victims by the million.
We have no fear of those plagues to-day, because we have obliterated
their causes. We know now that the prevention of those frightful
epidemics is merely a matter of sanitation, scientific hygiene,
intelligent, healthful living. We know that they were scourges forged by
ignorance and not "judgments" of God.

Is it not reasonable to believe that, having conquered so many of the
enemies of the race by intelligent thought and scientific methods, we
can conquer them all by similar means? Poverty is a plague, a mental
disease which can be conquered by intelligent scientific methods. We
know its causes and we can remove them. They are largely mental.

It is not necessary to call in a physician to treat the poverty disease.
The sufferer can be his own physician. He can heal himself. If you are
afflicted with the disease, and want to know how to get rid of it, read
the next chapter.




CHAPTER VII

MAKING YOURSELF A PROSPERITY MAGNET

    Though culture is the most important business of life. The habit
    of claiming as our own, as a vivid, present reality that which we
    desire with all our heart, is a magnetic power which attracts the
    things we long for. The more persistently we hold the prosperity
    thought, the more we strengthen and intensify it, the more we
    increase its power to attract prosperity.

    Thinking abundance, visualizing prosperity, will open up the mind,
    and set the thought currents toward increased supply.


We are so made that about all we get in life is the reflex of what first
flows out from us. Whatever thought you send out will draw to you in the
material world a corresponding reality.

Every human being is a magnet, the attractive power of which may be
developed in any desired direction. Each one can so direct this power
that he can draw to himself whatever he wills.

Before your life can be really effective you must make yourself a magnet
for the things that will make it so. You must learn how to attract, how
to draw to yourself all that will help you to succeed in your work, that
will enable you to attain your ambitions.

If poverty is holding you down, you can conquer it by making yourself a
prosperity magnet. We are living in the midst of a stream of
inexhaustible supply. It is one's own fault if he does not take from
this stream whatever he needs.

What we get in life we get by the law of attraction. Like attracts like.
Whatever you may have managed to get together in this world you have
attracted by your mentality. You may say that you have earned these
things, that you have bought them with your salary, the fruit of your
endeavor. True, but your thought preceded your endeavor. Your mental
plan went before your achievement.

The mere changing of your mental attitude will very soon begin to change
conditions. Your decision to face toward prosperity hereafter, to
cultivate it, to make yourself a prosperity magnet will tend to draw to
you the things that will satisfy your ambition.

The text "He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed" is the
expression of a fundamental truth. The pictures you make in your mind's
eye, the thoughts you harbor are day by day building your outward
conditions. They are real forces working ceaselessly in the unseen, and
the more you think and visualize favorable conditions the more you
increase your power to realize them. You make yourself a magnet for the
thing you desire. This is a psychological law.

If you want to become a prosperity magnet you must not only think
prosperity but you must also turn your back resolutely on poverty. Begin
to-day. Don't wait for to-morrow or next day. If you don't look
prosperous, assume a prosperous appearance. Dress as far as possible
like a prosperous man or woman, walk like one, act like one, think in
terms of prosperity. A mental healer could not cure a cancer by holding
in his mind a picture of the hideous disease, with all its horrible
appearances and symptoms. He must eliminate all this from his mind. He
must see his patient whole, clean, healthy, just as God intended him to
be, free from all disease. He must picture to himself the ideal man, and
declare his divinity.

The same thing is true in curing yourself of poverty. You can not do
this as long as you hold poverty-stricken conditions in your mind. If
you want to be prosperous you must hold the prosperous thought, the
prosperous picture in your mind. You must refuse to see or recognize
poverty. You must not acknowledge it in your manner. You must erase all
marks of it, not only from your mental attitude, but just as far as
possible from your appearance. Even if you are not able to wear fine
clothes at first, or to live in a fine house, you can radiate the hope
and expectancy of the glorious inheritance which is your birthright, and
everything about you will reflect this light.

Prosperity begins in the mind. You must lay its foundations in your
thoughts, surround yourself with a prosperity atmosphere. In other
words, you will build into your environment, into your life, whatever
dwells in your mind.

We hear of some people that "they are always lucky"; "everything seems
to come their way." Things come their way because there are invisible
thought forces radiating from their minds toward the goal they have set
for themselves. Things fall in line and come our way just in proportion
to the force and velocity of the thought forces we project.

Thinking better things might be called the first aid to the poor. To
picture yourself as prosperous, living in a comfortable home, wearing
good clothes, surrounded with the refinements of life, in a position to
do your best work in the service of mankind, this is to put yourself
into the current that runs successward.

It is a strange thing that most of us believe the Creator will help us
in everything but our financial troubles. We seem to think that it is in
some way almost sacrilegious to call upon Him for money to meet our
needs. We may ask for comfort, for solace in our afflictions, for the
assuaging of our griefs and the healing of our diseases, but to implore
God to help us to pay the rent, to pay off the mortgage on the home or
the farm, does not seem quite right.

Yet we know perfectly well that every mouthful of food we eat, the
material for the clothing we wear and for the houses we live in, every
breath we breathe must come from this Divine Source, of infinite supply.
If the sun were to be blotted out, or to cease to send its magic rays to
the earth, in a few days there would not be a single living thing on the
globe. Not a human being, not an animal could exist without it. Not a
tree, not a plant, not a flower, no fruits, no vegetables, no grass,
nothing green, no vegetable life would be possible. Without the sun's
energizing power all life would cease on this planet. It would be as
cold, barren and lifeless as on the moon. The Creator is the builder and
provider of the universe. Everything we have comes from Him, and without
the supply which flows from His abundance we could not live a single
instant, and why should we not look to this great Source for our money
supply?

The truth is we were all intended to live the life abundant. The Creator
never meant His children to grovel in poverty, to spend their lives in
drudgery and uncertainty. They have a right to their inheritance of all
that is good and beautiful, all that is needful for their welfare. We
were not intended to live the pinched, starved, stunted lives of
paupers. It is our own fault if we do. The door to opulence is open to
every human being born into this world, and no one but himself can close
that door. No human being can shut out the lowliest child that is born
from his divine inheritance. The only real poverty is in the mind, and
no one can control one's mind but himself.

Never for a moment harbor the thought that anything can come to you but
prosperity, for this is your birthright; and because it is, you should
demand it. Instead of admitting poverty say to yourself, "I am in the
midst of abundance. I lack nothing that I need because my Father is the
Infinite Source."

Turn your back on poverty. Make up your mind that you will never again
have anything to do with it, that you will not encourage it by dwelling
on and visualizing poverty suggestions. Face toward prosperity. Think
of, and plan for prosperous conditions; struggle toward prosperity with
all your might and you will draw it to you.

Suppose you are poor and live in a humble home, just have a talk with
your wife and children, and make up your minds that you will all focus
on your objective--improved conditions,--that you will face the other
way, toward prosperity instead of poverty. Say to yourself, "It is a
shame for God's children to exhibit such a pauperized appearance. It is
a reflection on my Father-Mother-God to go about among my fellows
looking as though everything had gone wrong with me, as though I were
disappointed with life. This is ungrateful. I can at least show
gratitude for health, for the privilege of living in God's pure air and
sunlight by holding up my head and walking erectly, joyously, as His
child should. I am really insulting the Creator, to whom I pray, by
reflecting such despair and degrading poverty in my mental attitude,
thus erasing the divine image from my face. No matter how little I have,
I can at least appear respectable. I can show that I respect myself by
doing away as far as possible with the depressing appearance and
influence of poverty."

Tidy up your little home and make it as neat and cheerful as possible.
Do the same with your dress and general appearance. Keep yourself better
groomed; look up, brace up, brush up, struggle up. Surround yourself
with an atmosphere of hopefulness and show everybody by the new light in
your eyes, the light of hope and expectancy of better things, that there
is a change in you. Your neighbors will notice it. They will see a
change in your home, in your wife, in your children. The change in the
mental attitude of yourself and family, through facing toward the light
instead of darkness, toward hope instead of despair, will make a
tremendous change in your whole outlook on life.

In this way you are making yourself a prosperity magnet; you are
radiating thought waves of hope, of ambition, of determination. Your new
mental attitude is expressed in an erect, manly carriage, in squared,
thrown back shoulders, in a neat, clean appearance, even though the
clothing be old and threadbare, in a winning, forceful, magnetic
countenance. You are thus establishing the conditions of success. The
positive prosperity thought flows out like a wireless current and
connects itself with similar thought currents. Hold the prosperity
conviction, work steadily toward your object; see opportunity and
success in your vista, determine to be somebody, hold firmly to the
resolve, and your mentality will direct the invisible magnet of your
personality to lift you higher and higher, to attract toward you others
who will help you in the direction in which you are moving.

If you want a better position, more salary, money to pay off debts, or
to get what you need, whatever it may be, cling with all the power of
your mind to the thing you are trying to get, and never for a moment
doubt you will get it. You do not inherit poverty, squalor. Lack and
want have nothing whatever to do with God's children. Your inheritance
is divine, grand, sublime. Poverty is a mental disease, and you carry
the antidote to its poison in your mind. You owe it to the One who has
given you life, health, who has given you brains to make something of
yourself, to improve your situation.

As long as you keep yourself saturated with the poverty conviction you
cannot rise out of poverty. You must think yourself out of it. "The Lord
is my Shepherd, and I _cannot_ want." Hold that thought firmly and
steadfastly in your mind. Believe it. Live up to it.

Abundance will never flow through pinched, doubting, poverty thoughts,
any more than clear, crystal water can flow freely through foul,
grease-clogged pipes. A right viewpoint must be your mental plumber to
keep the connection open and free. Things of a kind attract one another.
The poverty thought attracts more poverty, the fear thought more fear,
the worry thought more worry, the anxiety thought more anxiety. On the
other hand, the faith thought, trust thought, and the confidence thought
attract things like themselves.

Poverty is a disease that can only be cured by prosperity remedies. The
prosperity thought is the natural antidote for the poverty germ. It
kills it. The poverty thought cannot exist in the mind at the same
moment with the prosperity thought. One will drive out the other. It
rests with you which one you will harbor and encourage.

Cling to the consciousness of your oneness with the All-Supply. Keep the
supply pipes between you and the Infinite Source of all good always
open. Don't pinch them. Don't cut off the supply by the limiting
poverty thought, the doubt thought, the fear thought, the worry
thought. Keep your supply pipes open by great faith in your
Father-Mother-God, who is more solicitous for your welfare than any
human parent could be. Hold fast to the anchor of your union with the
Infinite Life; keep in the current running Godward and your life will
not dry up or become barren, will not be blighted and blasted by the
poverty drought.

The trouble with us is that we have been in the habit of looking for a
material supply when our first supply must be mental. We keep the supply
avenues open or we close them with our thoughts, our convictions. We
materialize poverty by our doubting thoughts, by our fears of it. We are
just beginning to find that we get out of this world what we think into
it and work out of it, that our thought plan precedes its material
realization just as the architect's plan precedes the building.

Remember that prosperity can not flow into your life while your mind is
filled with poverty thoughts and convictions. We go in the direction of
our thought and our convictions. By no law can you expect to get that
which you do not believe you will get. Prosperity can not come to you
if you are all the time driving it away from you by your poverty
thought.

You must think in a positive determined way that you are going to
succeed in whatever you desire to do or to be before you can expect
success. That is the first condition by which you make yourself a magnet
for the thing you are after. It doesn't matter whether it is work or
money, a better position or health, or whatever else it is, your
thoughts about it must be positive, clean cut, decisive, persistent. No
weak, wobbly "Perhaps I may get it," or "Maybe it will come some time,"
or "I wonder if I shall get this," or "if I can do that" sort of thought
will ever help you to get anything in this world or the next.

When young John Wanamaker started with a pushcart to deliver his first
sale of clothing he turned on a positive current toward a merchant
princeship. As he passed big clothing stores he pictured himself as a
great merchant, owner of a much bigger establishment than any of those
he saw, and he did not neutralize or weaken this thought current by all
sorts of doubts or fears as to the possibility of reaching the goal of
his ambition.

Most people think too much about blindly forcing themselves ahead. They
do not realize that they can, by the power of thought, make themselves
magnets to draw to them the things that will help them to get on.
Wanamaker attracted to himself the forces that make a merchant prince.
Every step he took was forward, to match the vision of his advance with
its reality.

Marshall Field projected himself mentally out of a little country store
into a clerkship in Chicago. Then he thought and worked himself out of
this clerkship into a partnership. Still thinking and climbing upward,
he next visualized himself at the head of the greatest merchandizing
establishment in America, if not in the world. His mind always ran
ahead. He was always picturing himself a little higher up, a little
further on, always visualizing a larger business, and so making himself
a magnet for the things he sought.

If John Wanamaker had been satisfied with himself at the start he would
have remained in his first little store in Philadelphia, and thus cut
off all possibility of becoming what he is--one of the greatest
merchants the world has ever seen. If Marshall Field had stopped
thinking himself higher up when the man he worked for in the little
Pittsfield store predicted that he never would succeed as a merchant, he
never would have been heard from. But Deacon Davis's telling Marshall
Field's father that the boy would not make a salesman in a thousand
years did not stop him thinking himself ahead. "On to Chicago, the City
of Opportunity," he said to himself, and on and up he went until the
little country merchant who predicted his failure was a Lilliputian in
comparison.

The story of each of these men is, so far as the success principle is
concerned, the story of every man who has ever succeeded in his
undertakings. They may not have been conscious of the law underlying
their methods, but they worked in unison with it, and hence succeeded.

The same thing is true of Andrew Carnegie, and of all the millionaires
and self-made men among us who have raised themselves from poor boys to
the ownership of colossal fortunes, or to commanding positions in some
phase of the world's activities.

Any one who makes the accumulation of a fortune his chief goal, and who
has grit, determination, will power and sufficient faith in himself to
stick to his purpose will get there. But long before the youth who
chooses such a goal has reached it, he will have dwarfed his manhood,
and shriveled his soul.

To get away from poverty is one thing; to set one's heart on money as
the ultimate good is another, and quite a different, thing. There is a
whole world of difference between so saturating one's mind with the
thought of money and its acquisition that there is no room for any other
aspiration, and the constant dwelling on the black and hopeless poverty
thought, the incessant picturing yourself as a pauper until you are so
convinced of poverty's hold on you that you destroy the very ability
which should help you to get away from it.

People who are down and out financially are down and out mentally. They
are suffering from a mental disease of discouragement and loss of hope.
There ought to be institutions conducted by government experts for the
treatment of these poverty sufferers, for they are just as much in need
of it as are the inmates of our hospitals. They need advice from mental
experts. They have lost their way on the life path, and need to be shown
the way back. They need to be turned about mentally, so that they will
face the light instead of the darkness. They should be shown that they
are stopping up their prosperity pipes, cutting off their source of
supply by their pinching, poverty-stricken, limiting thought. Their
whole mental attitude points toward failure, toward poverty, and by a
natural law their outward conditions conform with the pictures they hold
in mind.

This poverty disease could be cured in the case of the majority of down
and outs, the failures, by proper mental treatments. If the people in
the great failure army to-day could be shown that as long as they hold
the poverty thought and go about with a sad, dejected expression on
their faces, as though there were no hope in life for them, they will
continue to be poor; but that if they will only turn about and face the
sun, so that their shadows will fall behind them, their conditions will
begin to improve, they would quickly take a new lease of life and
courage. These mental prosperity treatments would generate in them a new
hope that would cause them to brace up all along the line.

What a revelation would come to the poor people of the world if they
would only eliminate from their minds for a single year the poverty
thought; if they would erase from their minds poverty pictures and all
the suggestions of grinding want that sadden and discourage; if, instead
of expecting poverty, and all that the idea implies, they could go
through one year expecting just the opposite,--prosperity,--visualizing,
talking prosperity, thinking prosperity, acting as though they expected
to be, as though they were, prosperous! Just this radical change of
thought, this transposition of mental attitude, the persistent holding
of the prosperous viewpoint for a year would not only change their whole
outlook on life, but would revolutionize their material conditions.

They would brush up and clean up the things they have; their ambition
would grow; their new way of looking at life would give an upward
tendency to their surroundings. No matter how poor, their squalid aspect
would go. Everything would take on a different appearance. There would
be a new light in the people's faces. There would be hope there instead
of despair,--expectancy of better things would give a glow of
cheerfulness to their countenances. There would be a light in their eyes
which never was there before. Working in the spirit of hope and
expectancy of better things instead of that of discouragement and the
fears of even greater poverty, they would forge ahead in a way that
would astonish themselves.

The time is not far away when we shall have prosperity practitioners who
will make a specialty of teaching people how to free their minds from
thoughts that produce poverty by replacing them with their opposites,
thus constantly enlarging the mental power of attraction until the mind
becomes a powerful magnet, ever attracting prosperity.

These specialists will teach people the creative power of right
thinking, and will show them how to attract their desires instead of
killing them, as so many do, by wrong thinking. Clergymen of the future
will do much toward eliminating poverty from among their people by
instructing them to turn their backs on it and to face toward
prosperity. They will teach them how to draw to themselves the sunlight
of prosperity.

The cure of physical disease is effected by arousing the curative,
restorative forces within the individual. These are brought into
operation largely through faith in the physician, in the remedy, in the
healer. The healthful mental attitude thus created overcomes the
disease.

The cure of poverty,--poverty is usually a mental disease,--is effected
in a similar way. The sufferer must first of all have faith in the great
Physician of the universe. When that is fully and firmly established
there will be no difficulty in flooding his mind with the prosperity
thought, the thought that our Father-Mother-God is the Author of
abundance, the Author of all the wealth of the earth, and that He is
infinitely kinder and more solicitous for our welfare than the fondest
mother could be for her child.

We have not yet tapped the possibilities of any part of the world's
resources. Every inhabitant of the earth to-day is treading on secrets
which would emancipate man from drudgery and allow him to live happily
instead of merely to eke out a wretched subsistence as he has done up to
the present. Hitherto, in the great majority of cases, we have barely
been existing on the husks of things. Now we are beginning to taste the
kernel, because we are coming into a knowledge of the powers locked up
within ourselves, and also of the illimitable supply of God's abundance.
Here and there, people are mastering the law of opulence. They are
demonstrating that they can conquer poverty by making themselves
prosperity magnets; that is, by thinking and working in conformity with
the law of opulence, of abundance.

It is monstrous that so many of God's children are starving right on the
shores past which the stream of inexhaustible plenty flows, a stream
laden with all the rich things of the universe. There is no excuse for
the horrible misery and suffering that exist in our midst. There is no
reason why the children of the King of kings should be harassed and
tortured, driven into premature graves by poverty, for the Creator has
produced enough to make every one of His children rich, to give them an
abundance of all they need. There is no necessity for those who have
inherited all the good things of the earth to remain poor.

The very structure of the human machine indicates that it was intended
for the best, that it was planned for comforts, for luxuries, and not
for poverty-stricken conditions. If we could only realize the
far-reaching influence of always expecting the best to come to us,
always expecting opulence, success, we would never allow ourselves to be
dominated by the black pictures of poverty and failure. If every one who
is suffering from the limitations and humiliations imposed by a grinding
poverty would proceed to establish the prosperity habit along the lines
suggested; if they would, by continually holding the prosperous thought,
convince the sub-conscious self that we were made to be successful, that
prosperity belongs to us we should soon sight the millennium.

When we affirm our divinity, and claim our heritage; when we realize
that our birthright keeps us in touch with the very Source of all
supply, when we know that it was never intended that God's children
should be poor or go hungry, that it was never intended they should live
in poverty-stricken conditions, then we shall have struck the very basic
principle of prosperity.

Hold the victorious attitude toward life and you will overcome all
unfavorable conditions.




CHAPTER VIII

THE SUGGESTION OF INFERIORITY

    As the initials which boys cut in the bark of a sapling become
    great, ugly scars on the grown tree, so the suggestions of
    inferiority etched upon the young mind become great ugly scars
    in the life of the adult.

    You may succeed when others do not believe in you, when everybody
    else denounces you even, but never when you do not believe in
    yourself.


In olden times criminals, fugitives from justice, and slaves were
branded. The words, "I am a fugitive," "I am a thief," or others
indicating their crime or their inferior status were seared on some part
of the body with a red hot iron.

In Rome robbers were branded on the forehead with a degrading letter.
Laborers in mines, convicts, and gladiators were also branded. In Greece
slaves were sometimes branded with a favorite poetical passage of their
master. In France the branding iron used on slaves and criminals often
took the form of the fleur-de-lis. In England deserters from the army
were marked with the letter D, and vagabonds, robbers and brawlers were
branded in some way to advertise their disgrace.

The barbarous custom of branding human beings with the badge of crime or
inferiority persisted in America even after it had been discontinued in
the mother country. Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" gives us a vivid
picture of the suffering inflicted on the moral delinquent by Puritan
moralists in Colonial days. The tragic heroine, Hester Prynn, is never
allowed to forget her sin. The sinister scarlet letter with which she is
branded proclaims her shame to every one she meets. While long after the
Colonial period, up to the time of their emancipation, slaves were
branded in Christian America with the initials of their owners as they
were in Pagan Greece and Rome.

The mere idea of this stamping human beings with an indelible badge of
disgrace, of inferiority, shocks us moderns. Yet we do not hesitate to
mark people to-day with the scarlet letter of outlawry, the brand of
ostracism. We put the criminal badge on our prisoners by shaving their
heads and clothing them in stripes, thus perpetually keeping before them
the suggestion that they are criminals, outlaws, apart from their kind.

We even carry our branding into our homes. In order to satisfy our cheap
vanity, we force our domestic workers to wear as a mark of inferiority,
a distinctive livery to remind them that they are menials, a lower grade
of being than ourselves. As a matter of fact, if it were not for these
branding distinctions, the maid would, in many instances, be taken for
the mistress and the valet for the master whom they far outrank both in
appearance and character.

There are certain inalienable rights which human beings inherit from
their Maker, rights which no fellow being, no human law or authority is
justified in taking away. No matter what offense a person may commit
against society we have no right to degrade him below the level of a
human being; we have no right so to bombard him with the suggestion of
degradation, of inferiority, that we are almost certain to make him less
a man; to lower his estimate of himself to such a degree that we rob
him of the power even to attempt to regain his self-respect and his
position in society. We have no right to insist that those who work for
us shall wear a badge of inferiority. We have no right to thrust the
suggestion of inferiority perpetually into the mind of any human being.

One of the greatest injuries we can inflict on any one is to convince
him that he is a nobody, that he has no possibilities, and will never
amount to anything. The suggestion of inferiority is responsible for
more blighted ambitions, more stunted lives, more failures, more misery
and unhappiness than almost any other single cause. Just as the constant
dripping of water will wear away stone, so the constant iteration of a
statement will cause its acceptance by the average person. Even though
the facts may be opposed to it, a constant suggestion presented to the
mind impresses us in spite of ourselves and tends to a conviction of its
truth.

When the weight of the Civil War was nearly crushing Lincoln, when it
was the fashion to denounce and criticise and condemn him, when he was
being caricatured as a hideous monster in the jingo press all over the
world, one day, walking the floor in the White House, he was overheard
saying to himself, "Abe Lincoln, are you a dog or are you a man?" During
these dark days it would appear that Lincoln sometimes had a doubt as to
whether he was really the man his closest friends knew him to be, or the
one an antagonistic press pictured him.

The curse of the inferiority suggestion not only tends to destroy our
faith in ourselves, but it often makes even the innocent take on the
appearance of guilt. When Lieutenant Dreyfus, through a foul conspiracy,
was convicted of the crime of treason against France, he showed
outwardly all the manifestations of guilt. When stripped, in the
presence of a vast multitude, in a public square in Paris, of all his
insignia of rank as an officer in the army of France, the epaulettes and
buttons being cut from his uniform and his sword broken, although
conscious of his innocence of the crime imputed to him he actually
looked like the guilty thing he was accused of being. And all but a very
few close friends in the vast concourse that witnessed his public
disgrace believed that even his appearance corroborated his guilt. The
brain of the unfortunate Dreyfus was a wireless receiving station for
the hatred, the contempt of millions of people who believed they were
looking at a vile traitor who had sold valuable military secrets to
Germany.

We are all influenced for good or ill by suggestion, but children and
young people are peculiarly susceptible to it. The constant suggestion
of stupidity, badness, and dullness by teachers or parents, filling a
child's mind with the idea that he is a blockhead, always blundering,
making mistakes, that he is no good, and never will amount to anything,
makes an indelible impression on his plastic mind.

The child naturally looks up to its parents and teachers and accepts
what they say as truth. He has implicit faith in their superior
knowledge and experience, which seem wonderful to him, and when they
tell him he is stupid, dull, slow, or bad, he takes what they say for
granted. He makes up his mind that, since they say so, he must be a
blockhead, and that they are right in thinking he is no good and will
never amount to anything.

It is criminal for a parent or teacher to brand a child as dull, stupid,
bad; to tell him that there is nothing in him and that he will never be
anybody or amount to anything in life. The effect on a sensitive child
is disastrous. Thousands of boys and girls have been stunted mentally,
their careers handicapped, and in some instances completely ruined by
such cruel suggestions of inferiority.

I have known men who kept taunting their sons with what they called
their imbecility and stupidity until the lads came to believe that they
were partial idiots and could not possibly make anything of themselves.
Many of them never did, because they were unable to overcome the
conviction of inferiority impressed upon them by their fathers.

I remember one quite pathetic instance of a sensitive boy whose
slightest mistake evoked a volley of abuse from his father. He would
tell him that he was not "half baked," that he was "an imbecile," "a
blockhead," "a blunderer," "a hopeless good-for-nothing." The little
fellow so completely lost faith in himself and became so cowed that he
hardly dared look people in the face. He could not be induced to enter
his home when there were callers or guests present. He would slink away
and hide himself in the shed or barn until they had gone. In fact, he
became so morbid that he shrank from association even with other boys
and the neighbors whom he had known from babyhood. The boy really had a
fine mind, and when the death of his father threw him on his own
resources, he managed, by sheer will force and dogged persistence, to
succeed in making an honorable place in life. But he has never been able
to get away from the early conviction of his inferiority, of his lack of
ability compared with others around him. All his later life has been
handicapped by those pernicious suggestions. Whenever he is asked to
assume any responsibility, to take a place on a committee or a board, to
speak in public or make himself prominent in any way, these boyhood
mental pictures of his "good-for-nothingness" rise before him like
terrifying ghosts and seriously cripple or paralyze his efforts. He has
always felt that there is some grave defect in his nature and that, try
as he may, he can not entirely overcome his handicap. This crippling,
cramping defective image of himself impressed on this man in childhood
and youth has robbed him of much of the best of life, of all the joy and
exhilaration that come from spontaneity, from the free, unshackled
expression of oneself, of all one's faculties.

Children are affected by praise or blame just as animals are. It is easy
to kill the spirit of a dog by abuse and ill treatment, so that in a
short time he will slink about with his tail between his legs, look
guilty and self-depreciatory. In short, he will take on all the
appearance of a "whipped cur." Thoroughbred horse trainers say that
after a horse has been beaten or abused a few times he loses confidence
in himself. His spirit is broken and when he sees the other horses
getting neck and neck with him, or perhaps gaining on him a little, he
is likely to give up the race. The destruction of self-confidence has
caused many a youth with the latent qualities of a thoroughbred to fail
in life's great race.

There are thousands and thousands of boys who do not develop quickly.
Their brains are strong and capable, but they work slowly, and as a
consequence the boys are misjudged and misunderstood by parents and
teachers alike. In other instances the stupidity and dullness for which
children are berated are only apparent. They are often the result of
timidity, shyness, excessive self-consciousness. The youngsters do not
dare to assert themselves. Especially is this true in families where the
parental rule is stern and repressive. The children are afraid to speak
aloud or to express themselves in any way.

The suggestion of inferiority deepens this defect till it becomes a
mania. Many of the tragedies of the pernicious "ranking system" by
examinations in our public schools and colleges are the result of an
acute sense of inferiority. Every year quite a number of public school
pupils and students in academies and colleges suffer nervous breakdown,
become insane or commit suicide because they fail to pass their
examinations. Chagrin and humiliation at the sense of inferiority
suggested by their failure unbalances them. In most of those cases lack
of confidence, not lack of ability, is the cause of failure.

You may say this is foolishness, but it is true. And if the suggestion
of inferiority is powerful enough to drive young people to suicide,
certainly the opposite, the suggestion of superiority, would multiply
the youth's ability and work a miracle in his career.

A child should never hear the slightest hint to the effect that it is in
any way inferior. Its whole training should tend to develop faith,
confidence in himself, in his powers, in his great possibilities. As the
twig is bent the tree is inclined. The child who is impressed in its
tender formative stage with the idea of its inferiority suffers a wrong
for which nothing in the after years can compensate.

Many young employees, especially if they are at all sensitive, are
irreparably injured by nagging, fault-finding employers, who are
constantly reminding them of their shortcomings, scolding them for every
trivial mistake, and never giving them a word of praise or
encouragement, no matter how creditable their work, or how well they
deserve it.

Enthusiasm is the very soul of success and one cannot be enthusiastic
about his work, he cannot take continued pride in it, if he is
constantly being told that it is no good, that it is in fact
disgracefully bad, that he should be ashamed of himself, and that he
ought to quit if he can't do better. This fault-finding and continual
suggestion of inferiority has ruined many a life.

A young writer, for instance, often gets a serious setback in his early
efforts because of a severe criticism, an unqualified condemnation of
his first book by a reviewer, or the return of his initial manuscript,
with an editor's sneering suggestion that he has made a mistake in his
calling. Harsh critics, editors and book reviewers have deterred many
young writers from developing their talent. The fear of further
criticism or humiliation, of being called foolish, dull or stupid, has
blighted in the bud the career of many talented young people who under
encouragement might have done splendid work. If he is of a sensitive
nature even though he really have great ability such rebuffs often so
dishearten him that he never has the confidence to try again.

In the same way many a possible clergyman or orator has been discouraged
by early failure and the humiliation of ridicule. In other words, unless
a youth is made of very strong material and has a lot of pluck and
indomitable grit, the suggestion of inferiority, perpetual nagging and
discouragement may seriously mar his career.

If instead of carping and harping on the little faults and mistakes of
those under their jurisdiction, and prophesying their utter failure and
ruin, parents, teachers, employers and others in responsible positions
would recognize and appreciate laudable qualities, there would be less
misery and crime in the world, fewer human failures and wrecks.

The perpetual suggestion of inferiority holds more people back from
doing what they are capable of than almost anything else. In the Old
World,--China, Japan, India, in England and other European countries,
for example,--who can measure the harm it has done in the form of
"caste." Think what superb men and women have been held down all their
lives, kept in menial positions, because they were reared in the belief
that once a servant always a servant; that because their parents were
menials they must also be menials!

What splendid brains and fine personalities we see serving in hotels,
restaurants and private households in Europe--often much superior to
the proprietors themselves. Saturated with the idea that the son must
follow in the father's footsteps, though they may be infinitely superior
in natural ability to those they serve, these men remain waiters,
butlers, coachmen, gardeners or humble employees of some sort. No matter
what talents they possess they are held in leash by the ingrained
conviction of generations that the accident of birth has decided their
position in life. They are convinced that the barriers established by
heredity and by caste, an outworn feudal system, are insurmountable.

How delightfully the gentle humorist Barrie satirizes this Old World
condition in his play, "The Admirable Crichton." How skillfully he
portrays the clever and resourceful butler, Crichton, who in the
crucible of a great emergency proves himself a born leader, a man head
and shoulders above the noble lord, his master.

When the yacht carrying the master and his family, Crichton and some
other servants, is wrecked, they escape with their lives to a desert
island. In their desperate plight the barriers of caste are broken down,
and master and man change places. Removed from an artificial
environment, where hereditary rank and wealth determine the status of
the man, Nature unmistakably asserts herself, and Crichton, by the tacit
consent of all, becomes leader. By the force of his inborn ability he
controls the situation. He commands, the others obey. Yet when they are
rescued by a passing ship and brought back to England, old conditions at
once resume their sway. Crichton, without a murmur, or thought of
change, falls back to his former menial position, and all goes on as
before.

While we Americans laugh at, or severely criticize and denounce, the
snobbishness of class distinctions in other countries, we are guilty of
similar snobbishness, especially in regard to one section of our
fellow-Americans--the Negro race. No matter how highly educated, how
able, how refined or charming a man or a woman, if he or she has but a
drop of Negro blood, we brand him or her with the stigma of race
inferiority.

I always feel sympathy for the colored people, especially for the better
educated and more refined men and women of this class who must suffer
keenly from the discrimination against their race. They see white people
avoiding them everywhere; refusing to sit down beside them in public
places, in churches, on trains and cars, everywhere they can possibly
avoid it. In the South they are not permitted to ride in the same cars
with whites, and in other parts of the country, while they may travel on
the ordinary day coaches, they are not allowed on the Pullman cars,
except as waiters and porters. Our hotels, private schools, public
places, and even many of our churches, practice similar discrimination.
The churches pretend to draw no color lines, but by their attitude most
of them practically do so.

Everywhere they turn in this land of ours, where we boast that every man
is "born free and equal," Negroes are embarrassed, placed at a
disadvantage. In all sorts of ways white people are constantly
humiliating them, reminding them that they belong to an inferior race,
and they take their places according to the valuation of those born to
more favorable conditions. This constant suggestion of inferiority has
done much to keep the colored race back, because it has added
tremendously to their sense of real or fancied inferiority and has been
a discouragement to their efforts to make themselves the equals of those
who look down upon them.

We can not help being influenced by other people's opinion of us. It
makes us, according to its nature, think more or less of ourselves, of
our ability. We are similarly affected by our environment. We
unconsciously take on the superiority or inferiority of our
surroundings. Employees who work in cheap, shoddy stores or factories
soon become tagged all over with the marks of inferiority, the cheap
John methods employed in the establishments in which they work and spend
their days.

If the employees in a store like Tiffany's or Altman's, for example,
were to be mixed up with those of some of the cheap, shoddy New York
stores, it would not take much discernment to pick out the worker in the
superior environment from the one in the inferior. To spend one's best
years selling cheap, shoddy merchandise will inevitably leave its mark
on those who do so. Even though we may struggle against it, we are
unconsciously dyed by the quality of our occupation, the character of
the concerns for which we work.

In making your life choice, avoid as you would poison shoddy, fakey
concerns which have no standing in their community. Keep away from
occupations that have a demoralizing tendency. Every suggestion of
inferiority is contagious, and helps to swerve the life from its
possibilities.

Every influence in our environment is a suggestion which becomes a part
of us. If we live with people who lack ambition, who are slovenly,
slipshod, or with people of loose morals, of low flying ideals, we tend
to reflect their qualities. If we mingle much with those who use slangy,
vulgar, incorrect English, people who are not careful about their
manners or their expression, these thi

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/41901