There is a great significance in that passage in St. Mark: "All the things whatsoever ye pray and ask for believe yehavereceived them and ye have." We are bidden to believe that what we wishhas 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.
There is a great significance in that passage in St. Mark: "All the things whatsoever ye pray and ask for believe yehavereceived them and ye have." We are bidden to believe that what we wishhas 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 verymuch 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 doinga 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, heoffered 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 fairIf fer anything ye wanted ye could only swap a prayer;I'd pray fer yours, an' you fer mine, an' Deacon Henry HospurHe 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 theconditions 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 partWith all his might, let no mandareto 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 beforced. 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 inyour 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 righton 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 thetruth, 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 neverdone 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 frequentrepetition 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 yourselfon 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. Iwas 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, withtheOne, 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 quicklyand 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'schild, 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 gladTo-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 thisdamnable 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 aMAN, not aTHING, 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 tobe 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 majorityNOW."
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. Whetherit 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.
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.
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 thatthey 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 ofthought 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 sayingthey "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 createthe 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. Shewas 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 geta 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 thinkcontinually 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, werehard 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 acareer, 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 toa 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, bemoaningtheir 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 canchange 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 tohave 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.