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PREFACE

EVER before in the history of mankind has there been such an awakening to the great possibilities of the power of right thinking as we are now witnessing in all civilized countries.

Metaphysical schools are springing up under different names in all parts of the enlightened world. People are getting hold of little bits of one great divine truth, a new gospel of optimism and love, a philosophy of sweetness and light, which seems destined to furnish a universal principle upon which people of all nations, of varying philosophies and creeds, can unite for the betterment of the race.

The basic principle of this great metaphysical movement has opened up many possibilities of mind building, character building, body building, and success building which are destined to bring untold blessings to the world.

We are all conscious that there is something in us which is never sick, never sins, and never dies, a power back of the flesh but not of it, which connects us with Divinity, makes us one with the Infinite Life.

We are beginning to discover something of the nature of this tremendous force back of the flesh, this power which heals, regenerates, rejuvenates, harmonizes, and upbuilds, and which will ultimately bring us into that state of blessedness which we instinctively feel is the birthright of every human being.

To present in clear, simple language, shorn of all technicalities, the principles of the new philosophy which promises to lift life out of commonness and discord and make it worth while; to show how these principles may be grasped and applied in a practical way in every-day living to each person’s own individual case is the object of this volume.

There is a growing belief that “God never made His work for man to mend.” We are just beginning to discover that the same Principle which created us, repairs, restores, renews, heals us; that the remedies for all our ills are inside of us, in Divine Principle, which is the truth of our being. We are learning that there is an immortal principle of health in every individual, which, if we could utilize, would heal all our wounds and furnish a balm for all the hurts of mankind.

The author attempts to show that the body is but the mind externalized, the habitual mental state outpictured; that the bodily condition follows the thought, and that we are sick or well, happy or miserable, young or old, lovable or unlovable, according to the degree in which we control our mental processes. He shows how man can renew his body by renewing his thought, or change his body, his character, by changing his thought.

The book teaches that man need not be the victim of his environment, but can be the master of it; that there is no fate outside of him which determines his life, his aims; that each person can shape his own environment, create his own condition; that the cure for poverty, ill-health, and unhappiness lies in bringing one’s self through scientific thinking into conscious union with the great Source of Infinite life, the Source of opulence, of health, and harmony. This conscious union with the Creator, this getting in tune with the Infinite, is the secret of all peace, power, and prosperity.

It emphasizes man’s oneness with Infinite Life, and the truth that when he comes into the full realization of his inseparable connection with the creative energy of the universe, he shall never know lack or want again.

This volume shows how man can stand porter at the door of his mind, admitting only his friend thoughts, only those suggestions that will produce joy, prosperity; and excluding all his enemy thoughts which would bring discord, suffering, or failure.

It teaches that “your ideal is a prophecy of what you shall at last unveil,” that “thought is another name for fate,” that we can think ourselves out of discord into harmony, out of disease into health, out of darkness into light, out of hatred into love, out of poverty and failure into prosperity and success.

Before a man can lift himself, he must lift his thought. When we shall have learned to master our thought habits, to keep our minds open to the great divine inflow of life force, we shall have learned the secret of human blessedness. Then a new era will dawn for the race.

O. S. M.

January, 1909.

I. THE POWER OF THE MIND TO
COMPEL THE BODY

ONG before Henry Irving’s death, his physician cautioned him against playing his famous part in “The Bells,” on account of the tremendous strain upon his heart. Ellen Terry, his leading woman for many years, says in her biography of him:

As Becket on the following night—the night of his death—his physicians said that he was undoubtedly dying throughout the entire performance. So buoyed up and stimulated was he by his great zeal for his work and the bracing influence of his audience that he actually held death at bay.

It is a common experience for actors who are ill to be cured for a time and to be entirely forgetful of their aches and pains under the stimulus of ambition and the brain-quickening influence of their audiences.

Edward H. Sothern says that he feels a great increase of brain activity when he is on the stage, and this is accompanied by a corresponding physical exhilaration. “The very air I breathe,” says Mr. Sothern, “seems more stimulating. Fatigue leaves me at the stage door; and I have often given performances without any suffering when I should otherwise have been under a doctor’s care.” Noted orators, great preachers, and famous singers have had similar experiences.

That “imperious must” which compels the actor to do his level best, whether he feels like it or not, is a force which no ordinary pain or physical disability can silence or overcome. Somehow, even when we feel that it is impossible for us to make the necessary effort, when the crisis comes, when the emergency is upon us, when we feel the prodding of this imperative, imperious necessity, there is a latent power within us which comes to our rescue, which answers the call, and we do the impossible.

It is an unusual thing for singers or actors and actresses to be obliged to give up their parts even for a night, but when they are off duty, or on their vacations, they are much more likely to be ill or indisposed. There is a common saying among actors and singers that they cannot afford to be sick.

“We don’t get sick,” said an actor, “because we can’t afford that luxury. It is a case of ‘must’ with us; and although there have been times when, had I been at home, or a private man, I could have taken to my bed with as good a right to be sick as any one ever had, I have not done so, and have worn off the attack through sheer necessity. It is no fiction that will-power is the best of tonics, and theatrical people understand that they must keep a good stock of it always on hand.”

I know of an actor who suffered such tortures with inflammatory rheumatism that even with the aid of a cane he could not walk two blocks, from his hotel to the theatre; yet when his cue was called, he not only walked upon the stage with the utmost ease and grace, but was also entirely oblivious of the pain which a few moments before had made him wretched. A stronger motive drove out the lesser, made him utterly unconscious of his trouble, and the pain for the time was gone. It was not merely covered up by some other thought, passion, or emotion, but it was temporarily annihilated; and as soon as the play was over, and his part finished, he was crippled again.

General Grant was suffering greatly from rheumatism at Appomattox, but when a flag of truce informed him that Lee was ready to surrender, his great joy not only made him forget his rheumatism but also drove it completely away—at least for some time.

The shock occasioned by the great San Francisco earthquake cured a paralytic who had been crippled for fifteen years. There were a great many other wonderful cures reported which were almost instantaneous. Men and women who had been practically invalids for a long time, and who were scarcely able to wait upon themselves, when the crisis came and they were confronted by this terrible situation, worked like Trojans, carrying their children and household goods long distances to places of safety.

We do not know what we can bear until we are put to the test. Many a delicate mother, who thought that she could not survive the death of her children, has lived to bury her husband and the last one of a large family, and in addition to all this has seen her home and last dollar swept away; yet she has had the courage to bear it all and to go on as before. When the need comes, there is a power deep within us that answers the call.

Timid girls who have always shuddered at the mere thought of death have in some fatal accident entered into the shadow of the valley without a tremor or murmur. We can face any kind of inevitable danger with wonderful fortitude. Frail, delicate women will go on an operating-table with marvellous courage, even when they know that the operation is likely to be fatal. But the same women might go all to pieces over the terror of some impending danger, because of the very uncertainty of what might be in store for them. Uncertainty gives fear a chance to get in its deadly work on the imagination and make cowards of us.

A person who shrinks from the prick of a pin, and who, under ordinary circumstances, can not endure without an anesthetic the extraction of a tooth or the cutting of flesh, even in a trivial operation, can, when mangled in an accident, far from civilization, stand the amputation of a limb without as much fear and terror as he might suffer at home from the lancing of a felon.

I have seen a dozen strong men go to their deaths in a fire without showing the slightest sign of fear. There is something within every one of us that braces us up in a catastrophe and makes us equal to any emergency. This something is the God in us. These brave firemen did not shrink even when they saw every means of escape cut off. The last rope thrown to them had consumed away; the last ladder had crumbled to ashes, and they were still in a burning tower one hundred feet above a blazing roof. Yet they showed no sign of fear or cowardice when the tower sank into the seething caldron of flame.

When in Deadwood, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I was told that in the early days there, before telephone, railroad, or telegraph communication had been established, the people were obliged to send a hundred miles for a physician. For this reason the services of a doctor were beyond the reach of persons of moderate means. The result was that people learned to depend upon themselves to such an extent that it was only on extremely rare occasions, usually in a case of severe accident or some great emergency, that a physician was sent for. Some of the largest families of children in the place had been reared without a physician ever coming into the house. When I asked some of these people if they were ever sick they replied, “No, we are never sick, simply because we are obliged to keep well. We cannot afford to have a physician, and even if we could it would take so long to get him here that the sick one might be dead before he arrived.”

One of the most unfortunate things that has come to us through what we call “higher civilization” is the killing of faith in our power of disease resistance. In our large cities people make great preparations for sickness. They expect it, anticipate it, and consequently have it. It is only a block or two to a physician; a drug-store is on every other corner, and the temptation to send for the physician or to get drugs at the slightest symptom of illness tends to make them more and more dependent on outside helps and less able to control their physical discords.

During the frontier days there were little villages and hamlets which physicians rarely entered, and here the people were strong and healthy and independent. They developed great powers of disease resistance.

There is no doubt that the doctor habit in many families has a great deal to do with the developing of unfortunate physical conditions in the child. Many mothers are always calling the doctor whenever there is the least sign of disturbance in the children. The result is that the child grows up with this disease picture, doctor picture, medicine picture, in its mind, and it influences its whole life.

The time will come when a child and any kind of medicine will be considered a very incongruous combination. Were children properly reared in the love thought, in the truth thought, in the harmony thought, were they trained to right thinking, a doctor or medicine would be rarely needed.

Within the last ten years tens of thousands of families have never tasted medicine or required the services of a physician. It is becoming more and more certain that the time will come when the belief in the necessity of employing some one to patch us up, to mend the Almighty’s work, will be a thing of the past. The Creator never put man’s health, happiness, and welfare at the mercy of the mere accident of happening to live near physicians.

He never left the grandest of His creations to the mercy of any chance, cruel fate, or destiny; never intended that the life, health, and well-being of one of His children should hang upon the contingency of being near a remedy for his ills; never placed him where his own life, health, and happiness would depend upon the chance of happening to be where a certain plant might grow, or a certain mineral exist which could cure him.

Is it not more rational to believe that He would put the remedies for man’s ills within himself—in his own mind, where they are always available—than that He would store them in herbs and minerals in remote parts of the earth where practically but a small portion of the human race would ever discover them, countless millions dying in total ignorance of their existence?

There is a latent power, a force of indestructible life, an immortal principle of health, in every individual, which if developed would heal all our wounds and furnish a balm for the hurts of the world.

How rare a thing it is for people to be ill upon any great occasion in which they are to be active participants! How unusual for a woman, even though in very delicate health, to be sick upon a particular day on which she has been invited to a royal reception or to visit the White House at Washington!

Chronic invalids have been practically cured by having great responsibilities thrust upon them. By the death of some relative or the loss of property, or through some emergency, they have been forced out of their seclusion into the public gaze; forced away from the very opportunity of thinking of themselves, dwelling upon their troubles, their symptoms, and lo! the symptoms have disappeared.

Thousands of women are living to-day in comparative health who would have been dead years ago had they not been forced by necessity out of their diseased thoughts and compelled to think of others, to work for them, to provide and plan for those dependent upon them.

Multitudes of men and women would be sick in bed if they could afford it; but the hungry mouths to feed, the children to clothe, these and all the other obligations of life so press upon them that they cannot stop working; they must keep going whether they feel like it or not.

What does the world not owe to that imperious “must”—that strenuous effort which we make when driven to desperation, when all outside help has been cut off and we are forced to call upon all that is within us to extricate ourselves from an unfortunate situation?

Many of the greatest things in the world have been accomplished under the stress of this impelling “must”—merciless in its lashings and proddings to accomplishment.

Necessity has been a priceless spur which has helped men to perform miracles against incredible odds. Every person who amounts to anything feels within himself a power which is ever pushing him on and urging him to perpetual improvement. Whether he feels like it or not, this inward monitor holds him to his task.

It is this little insistent “must” that dogs our steps; that drives and bestirs us; that makes us willing to suffer privations and endure hardships, inconveniences, and discomforts; to work slavishly, in fact, when inclination tempts us to take life easy.

II. POVERTY A MENTAL
DISABILITY

OVERTY is an abnormal condition. It does not fit any human being’s constitution. It contradicts the promise and the prophecy of the divine in man. The Creator never intended that man should be a pauper, a drudge, or a slave. There is not a single indication in man’s wonderful mechanism that he was created for a life of poverty. There is something larger and grander for him in the divine plan than perpetual slavery to the bread-winning problem.

No man can do his best work—bring out the best thing in him—while he feels want tugging at his heels; while he is hampered, restricted, forever at the mercy of pinching circumstances.

The very poor, those struggling to keep the wolf at bay, cannot be independent. They cannot order their lives. Often they cannot afford to express their opinions, or to have individual views. They cannot always afford to live in decent locations or in healthful houses.

Praise it who will, poverty in its extreme form is narrowing, belittling, contracting, ambition-killing—an unmitigated curse. There is little hope in it, little prospect in it, little joy in it. It often develops the worst in man and kills love between those who would otherwise live happily together.

It is difficult for the average human being to be a real man or real woman in extreme poverty. When worried, embarrassed, entangled with debts, forced to make a dime perform the proper work of a dollar, it is almost impossible to preserve that dignity and self-respect which enable a man to hold up his head and look the world squarely in the face. Some rare and beautiful souls have done this, and in dire poverty have given us examples of noble living that the world will never forget; but on the other hand, how many has its lash driven to the lowest depths!

Everywhere we see the marks of pinching, grinding, blighting poverty. The hideous evidences of want stare us in the face every day. We see it in prematurely old, depressed faces, and in children who have had no childhood and who have borne the mark of the poverty curse ever since their birth. We see it shadowing bright young faces, and often blighting the highest ambition, and dwarfing the most brilliant ability.

Poverty is more often a curse than a blessing, and those who praise its virtues would be the last to accept its hard conditions.

I wish I could fill every youth with an utter dread and horror of it; make him feel its shame, when preventable, its constraint, its bitterness, its strangling effect.

There is no disgrace in unpreventable poverty. We respect and honor people who are poor because of ill-health or misfortune which they cannot prevent. The disgrace is in not doing our level best to better our condition.

What we denounce is preventable poverty, that which is due to vicious living, to slovenly, slipshod, systemless work, to idling and dawdling, or to laziness; that poverty which is due to the lack of effort, to wrong thinking, or to any preventable cause.

Every man should be ashamed of poverty which he can prevent, not only because it is a reflection upon his ability, and will make others think less of him, but also because it will make him think less of himself.

The trouble with many of poverty’s victims to-day is that they have no confidence that they can get away from poverty. They hear so much about the poor man’s lack of opportunities; that the great money combinations will compel nearly everybody in the future to work for somebody else; they hear so much talk of the grasping and the greed of the rich, that they gradually lose confidence in their ability to cope with conditions and become disheartened.

I do not overlook the heartless, grinding, grasping practices of many of the rich, or the unfair and cruel conditions brought about by unscrupulous political and financial schemers; but I wish to show the poor man that, notwithstanding all these things, multitudes of poor people do rise above their iron environment, and that there is hope for him. The mere fact that so many continue to rise, year after year, out of just such conditions as you may think are fatal to your advancement, ought to convince you that you also can conquer your environment.

When a man loses confidence, every other success quality gradually leaves him, and life becomes a grind. He loses ambition and energy, is not so careful about his personal appearance, is not so painstaking, does not use the same system and order in his work, grows slack and slovenly and slipshod in every way, and becomes less and less capable of conquering poverty.

Because they cannot keep up appearances and live in the same style as their wealthy neighbors, poor people often become discouraged, and do not try to make the best of what they have. They do not “put their best foot forward” and endeavor with all their might to throw off the evidences of poverty. If there is anything that paralyzes power it is the effort to reconcile ourselves to an unfortunate environment, instead of regarding it as abnormal and trying to get away from it.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal. It is the attitude of mind that is destructive, the facing toward poverty, and feeling so reconciled to it that one does not turn about face and struggle to get away from it with a determination which knows no retreat.

It is facing the wrong way, toward the black, depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and demoralizes ambition. So long as you carry around a poverty atmosphere and radiate the poverty thought, you will be limited.

You will never be anything but a beggar while you think beggarly thoughts, but a poor man while you think poverty, a failure while you think failure thoughts.

If you are afraid of poverty, if you dread it, if you have a horror of coming to want in old age, it is more likely to come to you, because this constant fear saps your courage, shakes your self-confidence, and makes you less able to cope with hard conditions.

The magnet must be true to itself, it must attract things like itself. The only instrument by which man has ever attracted anything in this world is his mind, and his mind is like his thought; if it is saturated with the fear thought, the poverty thought, no matter how hard he works, he will attract poverty.

You walk in the direction in which you face. If you persist in facing toward poverty, you cannot expect to reach abundance. When every step you take is on the road to failure, you cannot expect to reach the success goal.

If we can conquer inward poverty, we can soon conquer poverty of outward things, for, when we change the mental attitude, the physical changes to correspond.

Holding the poverty thought keeps us in touch with poverty-stricken, poverty-producing conditions; and the constant thinking of poverty, talking poverty, living poverty, makes us mentally poor. This is the worst kind of poverty.

We cannot travel toward prosperity until the mental attitude faces prosperity. As long as we look toward despair, we shall never arrive at the harbor of delight.

The man who persists in holding his mental attitude toward poverty, or who is always thinking of his hard luck and failure to get on, can by no possibility go in the opposite direction, where the goal of prosperity lies.

I know a young man who was graduated from Yale only a few years ago—a broad-shouldered, vigorous young fellow—who says that he hasn’t the price of a hat, and that if his father did not send him five dollars a week he would go hungry.

This young man is the victim of discouragement, of the poverty thought. He says that he does not believe there is any success for him. He has tried many things, and has failed in them all. He says he has no confidence in his ability, that his education has been a failure, and that he has never believed he could succeed. So he has drifted from one thing to another, and is poor and a nobody, just because of his mental attitude, because he does not face the right way.

If you would attract good fortune you must get rid of doubt. As long as that stands between you and your ambition, it will be a bar that will cut you off. You must have faith. No man can make a fortune while he is convinced that he can’t. The “I can’t” philosophy has wrecked more careers than almost anything else. Confidence is the magic key that unlocks the door of supply.

I never knew a man to be successful who was always talking about business being bad. The habit of looking down, talking down, is fatal to advancement.

The Creator has bidden every man to look up, not down, has made him to climb, not to grovel. There is no providence which keeps a man in poverty, or in painful or distressing circumstances.

A young man of remarkable ability, who has an established position in the business world, recently told me that for a long time he had been very poor, and remained so until he made up his mind that he was not intended to be poor, that poverty was really a mental disease of which he intended to rid himself. He formed a habit of daily affirming abundance and plenty, of asserting his faith in himself and in his ability to become a man of means and importance in the world. He persistently drove the poverty thought out of his mind. He would have nothing to do with it.

He would not allow himself to think of possible failure. He turned his face toward the success goal, turned his back forever on poverty and failure, and he tells me that the result of his positive attitude and persistent affirmation has been marvellous.

He says that he used to pinch himself in every possible way in order to save in little ways. He would eat the cheapest kind of food, and as sparingly as possible. He would rarely go on a street-car, even if he had to walk for miles. Under the new impulse he completely changed his habits, resolved that he would go to good restaurants, that he would get a comfortable room in a good location, and that he would try in every way to meet cultured people, and to form acquaintances with those above him who could help him.

The more liberal he has been, the better he has been to himself in everything which could help him along, which would tend to a higher culture and a better education, the more things have come his way. He found that it was his pinched, stingy thoughts that shut off his supply.

Although he is now living well, he says that the amount he spends is a mere bagatelle compared with the larger things that come to him from his enlarged thought, his changed attitude of mind.

Stingy, narrow minds do not attract money. If they get money they usually get it by parsimonious saving, rather than by obeying the law of opulence. It takes a broad, liberal mind to attract money. The narrow, stingy mind shuts out the flow of abundance.

It is the hopeful, buoyant, cheerful attitude of mind that wins. Optimism is a success builder; pessimism an achievement killer.

Optimism is the great producer. It is hope, life. It contains everything which enters into the mental attitude which produces and enjoys.

Pessimism is the great destroyer. It is despair, death. No matter if you have lost your property, your health, your reputation even, there is always hope for the man who keeps a firm faith in himself and looks up.

As long as you radiate doubt and discouragement, you will be a failure. If you want to get away from poverty, you must keep your mind in a productive, creative condition. In order to do this you must think confident, cheerful, creative thoughts. The model must precede the statue. You must see a new world before you can live in it.

If the people who are down in the world, who are side-tracked, who believe that their opportunity has gone by forever, that they can never get on their feet again, only knew the power of reversal of their thought, they could easily get a new start.

I know a family whose members completely reversed their condition by reversing their mental attitude. They had been living in a discouraging atmosphere so long that they were convinced that success was for others, but not for them. They believed so thoroughly that they were fated to be poor that their home and entire environment were pictures of dilapidation and failure. Everything was in a run-down condition. There was almost no paint on the house, no carpets on the floors, and scarcely a picture on the wall—nothing to make the home comfortable and cheerful. All the members of the family looked like failures. The home was gloomy, cold, and cheerless. Everything about it was depressing.

One day the mother read something that suggested that poverty was largely a mental disease, and she began at once to reverse her thinking habit, and gradually to replace all discouraging, despondency, failure thoughts with their opposites. She assumed a sunny, cheerful attitude, and looked and acted as if life were worth living.

Soon the husband and children caught the contagion of her cheerfulness, and in a short time the whole family was facing the light. Optimism took the place of pessimism. The husband completely changed his habits. Instead of going to his work unshaven and unkempt, with slovenly dress and slipshod manner, he became neat and tidy. He braced up, brushed up, cleaned up, and looked up. The children followed his example. The house was repaired, renovated within and without, and the family forever turned their backs on the dark picture of poverty and failure.

The result of all this was that it brought what many people would call “good luck.” The change in the mental attitude, the outlook toward success and happiness instead of failure, reacted upon the father’s mind, gave him new hope and new courage, and so increased his efficiency that he was soon promoted, as were also his sons. After two or three years of the creative, inspiring atmosphere of hope and courage, the entire family and the home were transformed.

Every man must play the part of his ambition. If you are trying to be a successful man you must play the part. If you are trying to demonstrate opulence, you must play it, not weakly, but vigorously, grandly. You must feel opulent, you must think opulence, you must appear opulent. Your bearing must be filled with confidence. You must give the impression of your own assurance, that you are large enough to play your part and to play it superbly. Suppose the greatest actor living were to have a play written for him in which the leading part was to represent a man in the process of making a fortune—a great, vigorous, progressive character, who conquered by his very presence. Suppose this actor, in playing the part, were to dress like an unprosperous man, walk on the stage in a stooping, slouchy, slipshod manner, as though he had no ambition, no energy or life, as though he had no real faith that he could ever make money or be a success in business; suppose he went around the stage with an apologetic, shrinking, skulking manner, as much as to say, “Now, I do not believe that I can ever do this thing that I have attempted; it is too big for me. Other people have done it, but I never thought that I should ever be rich or prosperous. Somehow good things do not seem to be meant for me. I am just an ordinary man, I haven’t had much experience and I haven’t much confidence in myself, and it seems presumptuous for me to think I am ever going to be rich or have much influence in the world.” What kind of an impression would he make upon the audience? Would he give confidence, would he radiate power or forcefulness, would he make people think that that kind of a weakling could create a fortune, could manipulate conditions which would produce money? Would not everybody say that the man was a failure? Would they not laugh at the idea of his conquering anything?

Suppose a young man should start out with a determination to get rich, and should all the time parade his poverty, confess his inability to make money, and tell everybody that he is “down on his luck”; that he “always expects to be poor.” Do you think he would become rich? Talking poverty, thinking poverty, living poverty, assuming the air of a pauper, dressing like a failure, and with a slipshod, slovenly family and home, how long will it take a man to arrive at the goal of success?

Our mental attitude toward the thing we are struggling for has everything to do with our gaining it. If a man wants to become prosperous, he must believe that he was made for success and happiness; that there is a divinity in him which will, if he follows it, bring him into the light of prosperity.

Erase all the shadows, all the doubts and fears, and the suggestions of poverty and failure from your mind. When you have become master of your thought, when you have once learned to dominate your mind, you will find that things will begin to come your way. Discouragement, fear, doubt, lack of self-confidence, are the germs which have killed the prosperity and happiness of tens of thousands of people.

If it were possible for all the poor to turn their backs on their dark and discouraging environment and face the light and cheer, and if they should resolve that they are done with poverty and a slipshod existence, this very resolution would, in a short time, revolutionize civilization.

Every child should be taught to expect prosperity, to believe that the good things of the world were intended for him. This conviction would be a powerful factor in the adult life if the child were so trained.

Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.

When a youth decides to become a physician, he puts himself in a medical atmosphere just as much as possible. He talks medicine, reads medicine, studies medicine, thinks medicine until he becomes saturated with it. He does not decide to become a physician and then put himself in a legal atmosphere, read law, talk law, think law. So, if you want success, abundance, you must think success, you must think abundance.

Stoutly deny the power of adversity or poverty to keep you down. Constantly assert your superiority to your environment. Believe that you are to dominate your surroundings, that you are the master and not the slave of circumstances.

Resolve with all the vigor you can muster that, since there are plenty of good things in the world for everybody, you are going to have your share, without injuring anybody else or keeping others back. It was intended that you should have a competence, an abundance. It is your birthright. You are success organized, and constructed for happiness, and you should resolve to reach your divine destiny.

When you make up your mind that you are done with poverty forever; that you will have nothing more to do with it; that you are going to erase every trace of it from your dress, your personal appearance, your manner, your talk, your actions, your home; that you are going to show the world your real mettle; that you are no longer going to pass for a failure; that you have set your face persistently toward better things—a competence, an independence—and that nothing on earth can turn you from your resolution, you will be amazed to find what a reënforcing power will come to you, what an increase of confidence, reassurance, and self-respect.

The very act of turning your back upon the black picture and resolving that you will have nothing more to do with failure, with poverty; that you will make the best possible out of what you do have; that you will put up the best possible appearance; that you will clean up, brush up, talk up, look up, instead of down—hold your head up and look the world in the face instead of cringing, whining, complaining—will create a new spirit within you which will lead you to the light. Hope will take the place of despair, and you will feel the thrill of a new power, of a new force coursing through your veins.

Thousands of people in this country have thought themselves away from a life of poverty by getting a glimpse of that great principle, that we tend to realize in the life what we persistently hold in the thought and vigorously struggle toward.

III. THE LAW OF OPULENCE

E talk abundance here.” I was struck with this motto in a New York office recently.

I said to myself: “These people are prosperous because they expect prosperity; they do not recognize poverty or admit lacking anything they need.”

The way to make the ideal the real, is to persistently hold the thought of their identity. The way to demonstrate abundance is to hold it constantly in the mind, to frequently say to yourself, “All that my Father hath is mine.” “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.” If all this is true (and you know that it is), any want or lack in your life is abnormal.

The great fundamental principle of the law of opulence is our inseparable connection with the creative energy of the universe. When we come into full realization of this connection we shall never want again. It is our sense of separateness from the Power that created us that makes us feel helpless.

But as long as we limit ourselves by thinking that we are separate, insignificant, unrelated atoms in the universe; that the great supply, the creative energy is outside of us, and that only a little of it can in some mysterious way be absorbed by a few people who are “fortunate,” “lucky,” we shall never come into that abundant supply which is our birthright.

And where did the false idea of the absorption of all the good things by the few, of the necessity of competition, originate? It had its origin in the pessimistic assumption that it is impossible for everybody to be wealthy or successful; in the thought of limitation of all the things which men most desire; and that, there not being enough for all, a few must fight desperately, selfishly for what there is, and the shrewdest, the longest-headed, those with the most staying power, the strongest workers, will get the most of it. This theory is fatal to all individual and race betterment.

The Creator never put vast multitudes of people on this earth to scramble for a limited supply, as though He were not able to furnish enough for all. There is nothing in this world which men desire and struggle for, and that is good for them, of which there is not enough for everybody.

Take the thing we need most—food. We have not begun to scratch the possibilities of the food supply in America.

The State of Texas could supply food, home, and luxuries to every man, woman, and child on this continent. As for clothing, there is material enough in the country to clothe all its inhabitants in purple and fine linen. We have not begun yet to touch the possibilities of our clothing and dress supply. The same is true of all other necessities and luxuries. We are still on the outer surface of abundance, a surface covering kingly supplies for every individual on the globe.

When the whale ships in New Bedford Harbor and other ports were rotting in idleness, because the whale was becoming extinct, Americans became alarmed lest we should dwell in darkness; but the oil wells came to our rescue with abundant supply. And then, when we began to doubt that this source would last, Science gave us the electric light.

Like Newton, the greatest scientists of the world still feel that they are playing with grains of sand on the shore of our illimitable supply in every line of human need. The possibilities of finding heat, power, and light in chemical forces should the coal supply fail are simply boundless.

The same thing is true of food. The most advanced agriculturist feels that he is but an amateur when it comes to the possibilities of mixing brains with the soil. Education and knowledge are enabling us to produce more from a few acres of soil than men formerly produced from hundreds of acres. Agriculture is still in its infancy. We know almost nothing as yet about the possibilities of getting nitrogen from the atmosphere, and of renewing the soil. No matter which way we turn, Science matches our knowledge with her marvellous reserves and nowhere is there a sign of limit.

There is building material enough to give every person on the globe a mansion finer than any that a Vanderbilt or Rothschild possesses. It was intended that we should all be rich and happy; that we should have an abundance of all the good things the heart can crave. We should live in the realization that there is an abundance of power where our present power comes from, and that we can draw upon this great source for as much as we can use.

There is something wrong when the children of the King of kings go about like sheep hounded by a pack of wolves. There is something wrong when those who have inherited infinite supply are worrying about their daily bread; are dogged by fear and anxiety so that they cannot take any peace; that their lives are one battle with want; that they are always under the harrow of worry, always anxious. There is something wrong when people are so worried and absorbed in making a living that they cannot make a life.

We were made for happiness, to express joy and gladness, to be prosperous. The trouble with us is that we do not trust the law of infinite supply, but close our natures so that abundance cannot flow to us. In other words, we do not obey the law of attraction. We keep our minds so pinched and our faith in ourselves so small, so narrow, that we strangle the inflow of supply. Abundance follows a law as strict as that of mathematics. If we obey it, we get the flow; if we strangle it, we cut it off. The trouble is not in the supply; there is abundance awaiting everyone on the globe.

The majority of us still believe in the idea of competition. We regard it as a necessary principle of business, as is indicated by such maxims as “Competition is the life of trade.”

If we could only realize and feel our close, intimate connection with the Power of infinite supply, we could not want.

It is the feeling of separateness from the great Power that makes us fear, just as the child’s separation from its mother fills it with fear and terror.

When we shall learn the cause of this feeling of separateness, that it is wrong thinking, sin, which isolates us, we shall know how to get in touch again with the great supplying Principle of the universe.

When we feel a sense of unity, an at-oneness with the Creator, we cannot fear, we cannot want, because we are in the very midst of the supply, in the very lap of abundance.

It is impossible for God’s image and likeness in man to reflect failure or poverty. Man’s divine image reflects prosperity, riches that are royal, divine abundance that never fails, plenty that can never grow less.

Many lives are like the great Sahara Desert, only here and there a little clump of green trees and flowers where there happens to be a little moisture; a tiny oasis here and there, watered by a little encouragement—some good fortune that has come even in spite of the fact that the mental attitude has been totally unfavorable to the production of prosperity.

A large, generous success is impossible to many people, because every avenue to their minds is closed by doubt, worry, fear. They have shut out the possibility of prosperity. Abundance cannot come to a mind that is pinched, shrivelled, skeptical, and pessimistic.

Prosperity is a product of the creative mind. The mind that fears, doubts, depreciates its powers, is a negative, non-creative mind, one that repels prosperity, repels supply. It has nothing in common with abundance, hence cannot attract it.

Of course, men do not mean to drive opportunity, prosperity, or abundance away from them; but they hold a mental attitude filled with doubts and fears and lack of faith and self-confidence, which virtually does this very thing without their knowing it.

Oh, what paupers our doubts and fears make of us!

No mind, no intellect is powerful or great enough to attract wealth while the mental attitude is turned away from it—facing in the other direction.

Our pinched, dwarfed, blighted lives come from inability to unite with the great Source of all supply. All our limitations are in our own minds, the supply is there waiting in vast abundance. We take little because we demand little, because we are afraid to take the much of our inheritance—the abundance that is our birthright. We starve ourselves in the midst of plenty, because of our strangling thought. The opulent life stands ready to take us into its completeness, but our ignorance cuts us off. Hence the life abundant, the river of plenty, opulence unspeakable, flow past our doors and we starve on the very shores of the stream which carries infinite supply.

It is not in our nature that we are paupers, but in our own mean, stingy appreciation of ourselves and our powers. The idea that riches are possible only to those who have superior advantages, more ability; those who have been favored by fate, is false and vicious.

People who put themselves into harmony with the law of opulence harvest a fortune, while those who do not in many cases do not find enough to keep them alive.

There is everything in feeling opulent. I know a lady who has such a wonderful appreciation of everything about her, who has such superb ideas of life and the grandeur of its meaning, that it makes one feel rich to converse with her. With her there is no such thing as commonness. The most ordinary duties when performed by her are lifted into dignity and grandeur. Things come to her without worrying or anxious thought. She loves everybody and everybody loves her. She has no grudges against anybody, because her very nature is sunshine. There is no lack in her life, because she believes in and relies without doubt or shadow of fear on the Infinite Source of supply. She is rich, opulent in the truest sense of the word. Such people make others feel rich.

On the other hand, we all know those who, no matter how much money they may have, never suggest opulence, never suggest anything rich or grand, because their natures are starved, shrivelled, and stunted. Greed and selfishness have sapped all the juices out of their lives and made them as barren of sweetness as sucked oranges.

We must think plenty before we can realize it in the life. If we hold the poverty thought, the penury thought, the thought of lack, we cannot demonstrate abundance. We must hold the plenty thought if we would reach plenty.

When we realize the fact that we do not need to look outside of ourselves for what we need; that the source of all supply, the divine spring which can quench our thirst, is within ourselves, then we shall not want, for we know that we only have to dip deep into ourselves to touch the infinite supply. The trouble with us is that we do not abide in abundance, do not live with the creative, the all-supplying sources of things.

It is said of a remarkably successful man of our times that he is unable to see poverty. His mind is so constructed that he seems to see abundance everywhere, and believes so implicitly in the law of opulence that he demonstrates it easily. He has no doubts to paralyze his endeavor.

In the main we get out of life what we have concentrated upon. What we do, our environment, our position, our condition, are the results of our concentration, our life-focusing. If we have concentrated upon poverty, and we have thus pinched our inflow of prosperity, if our thoughts have been of our unworthiness and the conviction that the best things in the world were not intended for us, of course we shall get what we have concentrated upon. If, on the other hand, we have centred our thoughts along the lines of prosperity, of abundance, if we have believed that the best things in the world are for us, because we are the children of God, and that health, happiness, and prosperity are our birthright, and have done our best to realize our ideals, then our surroundings, our condition will outpicture our thought, our concentration, our mental attitude.

I have known people who have longed all their lives to be happy, and yet they have concentrated their minds on their loneliness, their friendlessness, their misfortunes. They are always pitying themselves for the lack of the good things of the world. The whole trend of their habitual concentration has been upon things which could not possibly produce what they longed for. They have been longing for one thing, and expecting and working for something else.

It is a great thing to learn to live in the All-Life, to keep close to infinite supply. Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.

Some natures are naturally filled with suggestions of plenty of all that is rich, grand, and noble. Some minds are so constituted that they instinctively plunge right into the marrow of creative energy. Producing is as natural to them as breathing. These people are not hampered by doubts, fears, timidity, or lack of faith in themselves. They are confident, bold, fearless characters. They never doubt that the infinite supply will be equal to their demand upon it. Such an opulent, positive mental attitude is creative energy.

When we have faith enough in the law of opulence to spend our last dollar with the same confidence and assurance that we would if we had thousands more, we have touched the law of divine supply.

“Charity giveth itself rich. Covetousness hoardeth itself poor.”

A stream of plenty will not flow toward the stingy, parsimonious, doubting thought; there must be a corresponding current of generosity, open-mindedness, going out from us. One current creates the other. A little rivulet of stingy-mindedness, a weak, poverty current going out from ourselves, can never set up a counter-current toward us of abundance, generosity, and plenty. In other words, our mental attitude determines the counter-current which comes to us.

Train yourself to come away from the thought of limitation, away from the thought of lack, of want, of pinched supply. This thinking abundance, and defying limitation will open up the mind and set thought currents toward a greatly increased supply.

When man comes into the full realization that God is his never-failing Supply, the Source of Abundance, the great Fountain Head of all that is good and desirable, and that he being His offspring, must be a part, an indestructible part of this supply, he will never more know poverty or lack of any kind.

The sons and daughters of God were planned for glorious, sublime lives, and the time will come when all men will be kings and all women queens. When man’s higher brain shall have triumphed over his lower brain and the brute shall have been educated out of him, there will be no poverty, slavery, or vice. The time will come when the most miserable creature that walks on the globe to-day will be higher than the highest now on the earth. The plan of creation will have failed if every human being does not finally come into his own and return to his God as a king.

IV. CHARACTER BUILDING AND
HEALTH BUILDING DURING SLEEP

HYSIOLOGISTS tell us that the mental processes which are active on retiring, continue far into the night. These mental impressions on retiring, just before going to sleep, the thoughts that dominate the mind, continue to exercise influence long after we become unconscious.

We are told, too, that wrinkles and other evidences of age are formed as readily during sleep as when awake, indicating that the way the mind is set when falling asleep has a powerful influence on the body.

Many people cut off the best years of their lives by the continuation in their sleep of the wearing, tearing, rasping influences that have been operating upon them during the day.

Thousands of business and professional men and women are so active during the day, live such strenuous, unnatural lives, that they cannot stop thinking after they retire, and sleep is driven away, or only induced after complete mental exhaustion. These people are so absorbed in the problems of their business or vocations that they do not know how to relax, to rest; so they lie down to sleep with all their cares, just as a tired camel lies down in the desert with its great burden still on its back.

The result is that, instead of being benefited by refreshing, rejuvenating sleep, they get up in the morning weary, much older than when they retired; when they ought to get up full of vigor, with a great surplus of energy and bounding vitality; strong and ambitious for the day’s work before them.

The corroding, exhausting, discord-producing operations which are going on when they fall asleep and which continue into the night, counteract the good they would otherwise get from their limited amount of sleep. All this shows the importance of preparing the mind to exercise a healthful, uplifting influence during sleep.

It is more important to prepare the mind for sleep than the body. The mental bath is even more necessary than the physical one.

The first thing to do is to get rid of the rasping, worrying, racking influences which have been operating upon us during the day—to clean the mental house—to tear down all the dingy, discouraging, discordant pictures that have disfigured it, and hang up bright, cheerful, encouraging ones for the night.

Never allow yourself, under any circumstances, to retire in a discouraged, despondent, gloomy mood, or in a fit of temper. Never lie down with a frown on your brow; with a perplexed, troubled expression on your face. Smooth out the wrinkles; drive away grudges, jealousies, all the enemies of your peace of mind. Let nothing tempt you to go to sleep with an unkind, critical, jealous thought toward another in your mind.

It is bad enough to feel unkindly toward others when under severe provocation, or when in a hot temper, but you cannot afford to deliberately continue this state of mind after the provocation has ceased and spoil your sleep. You cannot afford the wear and tear. It takes too much out of you. Life is too short, time too precious to spend any part of it in unprofitable, health-wrecking, soul-racking thoughts. Be at peace with all the world at least once in every twenty-four hours. You cannot afford to allow the enemies of your happiness to etch their miserable images deeper and deeper into your character as you sleep. Erase them all. Start every night with a clean slate.

If you have been impulsive, foolish, wicked during the day in your treatment of others; if you have been holding a revengeful, ugly, or jealous attitude toward others, wipe off your mental slate now and start anew. Obey the injunction of St. Paul, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”

If you have difficulty in banishing unpleasant or torturing thoughts, force yourself to read some good, inspiring book; something that will take out your wrinkles and put you in a happy mood, and will reveal to you the real grandeur and beauty of life; that will make you feel ashamed of your petty meannesses and narrow, uncharitable thoughts.

Saturate your mind with pleasant memories and with dreams of great expectations. Just imagine yourself the man or woman you long to become, filled with happiness, prosperity, and power. Hold tenaciously the ideal of the character you most admire, the personality to which you aspire—the broad, magnanimous, large-hearted, deep-minded, lovable soul which you wish it were possible for you to become. The habit of such beautiful life-picturing and the power of reverie on retiring will very quickly begin to reproduce itself, outpicture itself in your life.

After a little practice, you will be surprised to see how quickly and completely you can change your whole mental attitude, so that you will face life the right way before you fall asleep.

A prominent business man told me recently that his great weakness was his inability to stop thinking after retiring. This man, who is very active during the day and works at a high tension, has a sensitive nervous organization, and his brain keeps on working both before and after he falls asleep as intensely as it did during the day. In this way he is robbed of so much sleep and what he gets is so troubled and unrefreshing, that he feels all used up the next day.

I advised him to cultivate the habit of closing the door of his business brain at the same time that he closed the door of his business office. “You should,” I said, “insist on changing the current of your thoughts when you leave your business for the day, just as you change your environment, or as you change your dress for dinner when you go home in the evening. Turn your thoughts to your wife and children, to their joys and interests; talk to them, play games with them; read some humorous or entertaining story, or some strong, interesting book that will lift you, in spite of yourself, out of your business rut. Go out for a long walk or a ride; fill your lungs with strong, sweet, fresh air; look about you and observe the beauties of nature. Or have a hobby of some kind to which you can turn for recreation and refreshment when you quit your regular business. Be master of your mind. Learn to control it, instead of allowing it to control you and tyrannize over you.

“Hang up in your bedchamber, in a conspicuous place where you can always see it, a card bearing in bold illuminated letters this motto: ‘No Thinking Here.’

“Shut off all thinking processes of every kind when you retire for the night, relax every muscle; let there be no tension of mind or body, and in a short time you will find that sleep will come to you as easily and naturally as to a little child, and that it will be as untroubled, as sweet and refreshing as that of a child.”

To all who are troubled as this man was, I would offer the same advice, for its adoption has proved very successful in his case.

It is a great art to be able to shut the gates of the mental power-house on retiring, to control oneself, to put oneself in tune with the Infinite, in sympathy with those about him, and in harmony with the world; to expel from the mind everything which jars or irritates—all malice, envy, and jealousy, the enemies of our peace and happiness—before we go to sleep. Yet it is an art that all can acquire.

It is possible for everyone, either by thinking, reading, or pleasant social influences, to conquer all discordant moods, to overcome every unkind feeling, to banish every frown from the face, every wrinkle from the mind, and to go to sleep with a smile on the face.

When you go to sleep in the right mental attitude you will be surprised to find how serene and calm, how refreshed and cheerful, you will be when you awake in the morning, and how much easier it will be to start right and to wear a smile for the day than it was when you went to bed worrying, ill-humored, or full of ungenerous, uncharitable thoughts.

The devotional attitude on retiring to sleep is of very great value, inasmuch as it tends to soothe, calm, and reassure the mind, to destroy all fear, worry and anxious thoughts and to put one in tune with higher, nobler thoughts.

Persistency in preparing the mind for peaceful, healthful, happy sleep will prolong your life and your youth. More important still, it will have a far-reaching influence on your health and the foundation of your character. The habit of clearing the mental temple of all discords, error, hatred, revenge, everything which tends to gloom and darkness before going to sleep, and persisting in holding bright pictures in the mind, in dwelling on noble and uplifting thoughts, will in time revolutionize the whole life.

We are just beginning to realize that there is an enormous power lying dormant in the Great Within of us, and that this latent force or power seems to be very susceptible to stimulus during sleep, when the objective world and its many disturbing conditions are absent.

We little realize the amount of activity—undirected activity—that goes on in our subconscious minds during sleep.

There is a lot of unconscious philosophy in the expression one so often utters, “I would like to sleep over this proposition,” problem—or whatever it is. Without knowing the secret of it, we realize that things somehow clear up during sleep in a remarkable way. We see things in a different light in the morning. Perhaps the thing we were most enthusiastic over the night before, and which, had we carried out, would have been obviously injurious, often seems silly, ill-advised, impossible to us in the morning, not because we really consciously thought much about it, but because there is something in our subconscious mentality which often solves knotty problems for us while asleep—problems which staggered us in our waking hours.

Great mathematicians, scientists, and astronomers have many times been surprised to find very difficult problems that their reason could not elucidate during the day solved without apparent effort during sleep.

There is no doubt that much of our moral education and character-forming is carried on during sleep subconsciously, and since the psychology of this education and character-forming during sleep is based on the fact that the processes which are going on in the brain when we fall asleep tend to continue during the night, we can readily see what marvellous possibilities lie in the right direction and guidance of this mysterious subconscious power.

I know persons who have performed wonders in reforming themselves by self-suggestion on retiring at night, holding the happy, inspiring, helpful suggestion in the mind up to the point of unconsciousness. Persons have overcome ugly tempers and dispositions in this way as well as other unfortunate traits. The holding of the vigorous, robust, healthy ideal—the ideal and the spirit of youth—has immense possibilities in the way of self-refreshment, reinvigoration, and rejuvenation, and is especially helpful to those who are advanced in years.

If those who are inclined to melancholy and the “blues” would, just before going to sleep, insist on the nothingness of these delusions, and substitute the bright, cheerful, hopeful, optimistic thought, they would very soon overcome this unfortunate tendency.

If poverty is grinding us under its heel, we should affirm before going to sleep that the Creator has provided sufficient to give everyone the necessaries and comforts of life, without any worry about them on our part. Instead of thinking of poverty we should hold in the mind the suggestion of opulence, of prosperity. We thus make the action of the subconscious mind attract to us what we need and desire.

If we have any defect or weakness, we should hold firmly and persistently in mind, before we go to sleep, just the opposite characteristic or quality; this will tend to attract to us the thing we long for. If we desire to overcome any vice, we should plead the wholeness, the completeness which we long to attain.

Bad temper, inebriety, selfishness and deceitfulness, all sorts of vicious and immoral tendencies, have been eradicated in this manner.

Children seem especially susceptible to suggestion, or what, for a better name, may be called the “going-to-sleep” treatment. This is because the subconscious mind is particularly active in the young and much more easily reached, especially during the first stages of sleep, when just dropping into unconsciousness.

Truths emphasized at this time will be remembered more readily by the child and are more likely to be acted upon during the waking hours than those which are emphasized while he is awake, for when he is in the subconscious state he does not antagonize advice.

Some very remarkable results in the correction of vicious tendencies in children have recently been accomplished by appealing to their divine natures—their better selves—through mental suggestion during sleep.

The effective treatment of sickness in infants and children through the medium of such suggestion shows how easily the subconsciousness can be influenced when the child is in the unconscious, or semiconscious state.

If a child is naturally timid, and afraid of “ghosts,” the darkness, or any other thing, the mother can often help it to overcome these fears by talking to it while it is dropping to sleep. If it is weak, delicate or ill, she can suggest the healing Christ-truth, the health-ideal, strength, vigor, harmony. If it is timid, she can suggest confidence and courage.

The suggestion of success to the child who has been backward in school, or who has failed in his studies, will often have a wonderful effect in the way of establishing confidence and hope.

If the mother talks to her child and reasons with it as it drops off into sleep, just as she would if the child were awake, she will find that her words will have far more effect than if he were conscious, for the stubbornness, the natural inclination to resist, to do that which is forbidden, which is present in the child’s mind during its waking hours, is quiescent, and it listens to and heeds its mother’s advice quietly, naturally, unquestioningly. The wise mother who makes all sorts of good suggestions to her children in her talks—substituting the good for the bad, love for hatred and jealousy, unselfishness for selfishness—soon finds a marked change in their dispositions. By injecting into the little life confidence, hope, love, joy, courage, self-reliance, purity—all the higher and nobler attributes—she can wonderfully change her child’s disposition.

The time will come when all mothers will understand the importance of suggestion in influencing a child’s conduct and shaping its character.

A few already recognize the power of mental suggestion in all its forms, but in the new age that is coming, none will be ignorant of its wonderful character-forming and life-transforming possibilities.

If those who have not tried it before begin now, I am sure that in a very short time they will be surprised at the beneficent results that will follow this persistent practice of flooding the mind with pure and noble thoughts before going to sleep—close up to the very point of unconsciousness.

I am sure those who try it will find delight and satisfaction in the habit not only of clearing the mind before going to sleep of all worry and anxiety, all grudges and jealousies—of everything that clouds the intellect—but also in stoutly and persistently claiming the things which they long for as already theirs.

Be sure that when you fall asleep there is only that in your consciousness which will help you to be more of a man—more of a woman. Determine that your mind, when you lose conscious thought, shall have in it no black images and no dark spots, but only beautiful images and thoughts of hope and good-will toward every living creature; that there shall be no failure thought, no poverty thought, no ugly, discordant thought, but that everything shall be bright, cheerful, hopeful, helpful and optimistic.

V. HEALTH THROUGH RIGHT
THINKING

ROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES, of Harvard University, says “we are just now witnessing a very copious unlocking of new ideas through the converts to metaphysical healing, or other forms of spiritual philosophy. The ideas are healthy-minded and optimistic. The power, small or great, comes in various shapes to the individual; power not to ‘mind’ things that used to vex one; power to concentrate one’s mind; good cheer; good temper; a firmer and more elastic tone. The most saintly person I have ever known is a friend now suffering from cancer of the breast. I do not assume to judge of the wisdom or unwisdom of her disobedience to the doctors, but cite her case here solely as an example of what an idea can do. Her ideas have kept her practically a well woman for months after she would otherwise have given up and gone to bed. They have annulled pain and weakness and given her a cheerful, active life; a life unusually beneficent to those around her.”

Few people realize how largely their health depends upon the saneness of their thinking. You cannot hold ill-health thoughts, disease thoughts, in the mind without having them outpictured in the body. The thought will appear in the body somewhere, and its quality will determine the results—sound or unsound, healthful or unhealthful. As it is impossible for a person to remain absolutely pure who habitually holds pictures of impurity in the imagination, so it is just as impossible to be healthy while holding the disease thought. There cannot be harmony in the body with disease in the mind.

The health stream, if polluted at all, is polluted at the fountain-head—in the thought, in the ideal.

The different organs seem to be especially susceptible to certain kinds of mental influence. Excessive selfishness, covetousness, envy, especially affect the liver and the spleen. Hatred and anger have a very aggravating influence upon some diseases of the kidneys. Jealousy seriously affects both the liver and the heart.

If there is fear, worry, anxiety in the mind, the heart’s action indicates it quickly. There is no doubt that where mental discord, such as worry, anxiety and jealousy, have become chronic, the heart suffers accordingly. Thousands of people have died from heart troubles which have been induced by mental discord.

Dr. Snow in the London Lancet asserts his conviction that the vast majority of cases of cancer, especially of breast and uterine cancer, are due to mental anxiety and worry. Jaundice from anxiety is reported by Dr. Churton in the British Medical Journal.

The liver is affected very materially by discordant thought. Jaundice often follows great mental shocks, especially frequent great and prolonged outbursts of temper.

It is well known that many people are made bilious by long-continued despondency and worry.

Dr. Murchison, an eminent authority, says: “I have been surprised how often patients with primary cancer of the liver have traced the cause of this ill-health to protracted grief or anxiety. The cases have been far too numerous to be accounted for as mere coincidences.”

The functions of the skin are seriously affected by the emotions.

Sir B. W. Richardson, in his work “The Field of Disease,” says:

“Eruptions on the skin will follow excessive mental strain. In all these, and in cancer, epilepsy, and mania from mental causes, there is a predisposition. It is remarkable,” he adds, “how little the question of the origin of physical disease from mental influences has been studied.”

We can never gain health by contemplating disease, any more than we can reach perfection by dwelling upon imperfection, or harmony by dwelling upon discord.

We should keep a high ideal of health and harmony constantly before the mind; and we should fight every discordant thought and every enemy of harmony as we would fight a temptation to crime. Never affirm or repeat about your health what you do not wish to be true. Do not dwell upon your ailments nor study your symptoms. Physicians tell us that perfect health is impossible to the self-dissector, who is constantly thinking of himself, studying himself, and forever on the alert for the least symptom of disease.

Librarians report that there is an astonishing demand among readers for medical books. Many who imagine they have some particular disease often develop a morbid curiosity or desire to read everything they can get hold of that bears upon the subject. When they find, as they do frequently, that some of the symptoms of the disease they are reading about coincides with their own, the conviction is still more deeply fastened in their minds that they have this disease. The strength of this conviction is often their greatest hindrance to a cure.

Nervous people with vivid imaginations rarely see life in a perfectly sane and healthful way; they are very apt to become morbid and to make mountains out of molehills. Every little ache or pain is exaggerated and interpreted as a symptom of something worse to come.

These people are powerfully affected by hereditary convictions. If they have an unfortunate family history; if their ancestors died of consumption, cancer, or any other of the dread diseases, the conviction that they are likely to develop one or the other of these fatal maladies hangs like a pall over their lives, seriously impairs their health, and paralyzes their efficiency.

What a terrible thing to go through life with such a nightmare staring one in the face! How foolish, and destructive of all power, to live with the spectre of death constantly by one’s side; to drag through years with the settled conviction that you are not going to live long; that there are terrible disease seeds within you which are liable to develop at any time and carry you off!

Think of a person spending years in getting a college and professional education, and more years still in training for a specialty, while all the time haunted by the possibility that he may be thwarted by the development of some terrible hereditary disease which may prematurely cut off his life! It would be enough to kill the ambition of a Napoleon.

I know people in delicate health who habitually hold in their minds sick and discordant thoughts. They are always thinking and talking of their ailments. They gloat over their symptoms, watch them, study them, look for them, until they have what they expect—for like produces like; it cannot produce anything else. A reversal of the thought—thinking of health instead of disease, and holding in mind the health picture instead of the disease picture—would cure many an invalid without medicine. Healthy thought is the greatest panacea in the world.

Many people not only cripple their efficiency, but keep themselves sick, or in a condition of semi-invalidism or diminished power, by holding constantly in their minds negative suggestions as indicated by such expressions as: “Oh, I do not feel well to-day”; “I feel miserable”; “I am weak”; “I am half sick”; “My food does not agree with me”; “I did not sleep well last night, and I know I shall not be good for much to-day.”

If you are constantly saying to yourself, “I am wretched, weak and sick,” “I am running down all the time,” how can you expect to become strong and well? “According to thy word be it unto thee.”

Health and vigor will never come to you if you perpetually harp upon your weakness and pity yourself because of your poor health. Health is integrity. Health is wholeness, completeness. If you talk anything else, you will get it, for “According to thy word be it unto thee.”

Imagine yourself an attorney pleading the cause of your health. Summon up every bit of evidence you can possibly find. Do not give away your case to your opponent. Plead it vigorously with all the strength you can command.

You will be surprised to see how your body will respond to such mental pleading; such robust, vigorous, healthy affirmative argument.

I know of a case where a physician in passing through a ward thoughtlessly said to the nurse, in a voice loud enough for the patient to overhear, “That man cannot live.” The young man happened to know enough about the power of the mind as a restorative to assert himself, and said to the nurse with great emphasis, “I will live.” He got well.

We do not realize how we weaken ourselves and destroy our powers of disease resistance by harboring the sick, the disease thought, by holding in the mind the idea of physical weakness and debility.

If we could always keep in the mind the strong, robust, vigorous ideal, the health ideal, the ideal of power instead of weakness, the ideal of perfection, wholeness, completeness; if we could only keep in the mind the ideal of the divine man God intended, and not the mere burlesque of a man which the breaking of laws, bad living, and sinning have produced; if we could only carry the ideal of personal power, which is our birthright, there would be no room for the harboring of the sickly ideal—the weak, debilitated, decrepit ideal.

If it were possible to have the mind in us which was in Christ, we should not have disease. Disease could not attack us any more than impurity or sin could find lodgment in His mind. The time will come when right thinking will be the great preventive medicine for all mankind, and when physical discord will indicate that someone has sinned in his thought. Humboldt said, “The time will come when it will be considered a disgrace for a man to be sick, when the world will look upon it as a misdemeanor, the result of some vicious thinking.”

I believe the time will come when disease will not be able to fasten itself upon those whose thought is pure, clean, and strong, because this quality of thought is healing. We used to regard dyspepsia, for example, as the result of a disordered stomach. Now we know it is the result of the disordered, discordant thought. It is the legitimate child of worry and anxiety, of jealousy and remorse.

The time will come when greed and all forms of selfishness will be looked upon as a disease which we pay very dearly for in the outpicturing of some physical discord. People little realize what price they pay in physical suffering for their selfishness.

We cannot think ill-health; we cannot hold the thought of disease; we cannot harbor convictions that this disease or that is lurking in the system—that there are seeds of disease within us only waiting for an opportunity to develop and destroy us without seriously impairing the harmony of the body and its efficiency.

Every discordant thought, every thought of ill-health, all the vivid pictures of unfortunate physical conditions held in the imagination, all the horrible ghosts of fear—the things we dread and are anxious about—all the passions of anger and hatred, jealousy and envy, greed and selfishness, impair or ruin digestion and assimilation, and affect the integrity of all physical functions.

The mind is the health sculptor, and we cannot surpass the mental health pattern. If there is a weakness or a flaw in the thinking model, there will be corresponding deficiencies in the health statue.

So long us we think ill-health and doubt our ability to be strong and vigorous; so long as we hold the conviction of the presence of inherited weaknesses and disease tendencies; so long as the model is defective—perfect health is impossible. The life, the health follow the thought, the conviction.

Somehow most people seem to think that health is something fixed by a sort of destiny or fate; that it is largely a question of heredity and constitution which cannot be materially altered.

But why should we not think the same about our happiness, about our vocation? We take infinite pains and spend many years in preparing ourselves for our life-work. We know that a successful career must be based upon scientific principles of training, of system and order; that every step of a successful career must be taken only after great thought and consideration. We know that it means years of hard work to establish ourselves in life in a profession or business; but our health, upon which everything else hangs—upon which it depends absolutely—we take very little trouble to establish.

When we remember that the integrity and efficiency of all the mental faculties depend upon health; that robust health multiplies tenfold the power of our initiative; increases our creative ability; generates enthusiasm and spontaneity; strengthens the quality of judgment, the power of discrimination, and the force of decision, the power of execution, we should be very diligent to establish it.

We should lay a foundation for our health just as we establish anything of importance—by studying and adopting the sanest and the most scientific methods. We should think health, talk health, hold the health ideal, just as a law student should think law, talk law, read law, live in a law atmosphere.

Health is largely a moral question. Systematic living alone will not produce it. We must establish it by right thinking, sane thinking.

Health can be established only by thinking health instead of disease, strength instead of weakness, harmony instead of discord, truth thoughts instead of error thoughts, love thoughts instead of hatred thoughts; by up-building thoughts which are constructive instead of destructive—tearing down.

Confidence is a powerful factor in health. We should thoroughly believe in our ability to keep ourselves well by healthful, harmonious, happy thinking.

So long as we doubt our ability to maintain health, so long as we picture to ourselves disease and physical weakness and vicious or inherited tendencies—it is impossible to attain to a strong, normal physical condition.

The time will come when we will no more allow discordant thoughts in our mind than we would scatter thistle seeds over our gardens. Knowing well that thinking is building, our thinking will be reflected in our bodies.

To make ill-health an excuse for non-performance of our great life duties will be a reflection upon our integrity; will indicate weakness or deception. Sickness and disease will show that we have not been true in our thought—in our motives—that we have sinned and are paying the penalty in suffering and thwarted ambition.

Many people to-day are ashamed to say they are ill, because they know that it indicates sin somewhere—a violation of the law of harmony, of health. We are beginning to see that it is not only unnecessary to be sick, but that it is a disgrace for God’s creatures to be whining and ailing and complaining when they ought to be doing the great things they were made to do. We ought to be living the abundant life which it was intended that we should live. We were so planned that existence alone should be a perpetual joy.

When we get a glimpse of our real divinity, we shall absolutely refuse to be sick. We shall be as much ashamed to confess that we are suffering from a cold, rheumatism, dyspepsia, or gout as we should now be to acknowledge theft. The coming man will radiate health and gladness as naturally as the rose exhales beauty and fragrance. He will radiate life and vigor as naturally as he breathes. Because he will think only healthful thoughts, he cannot possibly radiate anything unhealthful. We reflect only the results of our thinking.

Thoughts are things, and they leave their characteristic marks on the mind. No joy thought can produce gloom, or health thought disease. The fear thought held constantly in the mind cannot produce a state of courage. It is only the courageous thought that can produce confidence.

Some great physician has said that there is something in man which was never born, is never sick, and never dies; and it is this something—this divine, omnipotent force—which heals our diseases. No matter what else we may call it, it is the force that creates, that restores us. We may call it the God principle, the Christ within us, the divine principle, the omnipotent force, or any name we please; it is the creative, the all-sustaining, infinite force.

The same Power that created us repairs us. If we could only harmonize our lives with this immortal principle, this best thing in us, we would reach our highest efficiency, our greatest possible happiness; and until we can harmonize ourselves with this something within us which was never born and never dies, this divine principle which never sins, we can never be efficient or very happy. This is the only reality in us—the only truth of our being.

The rust which gradually eats away the piano strings cannot destroy the great law of harmony. The disease which destroys the nerve cells, the brain cells, does not affect in the least our reality—the truth of our being. That is indestructible, immortal—beyond the reach of what we call death. We all feel, like the great German physician, that there is something within us which can never be sick, which is not subject to disease, and which is as immortal as God Himself.

Man is Mind. That is the great reality of life. The way to establish health is to think hourly that you “live and move and have your being” in the great God principle. That is the underlying truth in all harmony. Like Paul, believe that no power can separate you from this divine love principle, this omnipotent power. Love and truth are always working for you. Carry the conviction constantly that the God principle is the only power in the universe. All creation, all life, have their origin in this.

VI. MENTAL CHEMISTRY

HE experiments made by Professor Elmer C. Gates have shown that irascible, malevolent, and depressing emotions generate in the system injurious compounds, some of which are extremely poisonous; and that agreeable, happy emotions generate chemical compounds of nutritious value, which stimulate the cells to manufacture energy.

“For each bad emotion,” says Professor Gates, “there is a corresponding chemical change in the tissues of the body. Every good emotion makes a life-promoting change. Every thought which enters the mind is registered in the brain by a change in the structure of its cells. The change is a physical change more or less permanent.

“Any one may go into the business of building his own mind for an hour each day, calling up pleasant memories and ideas. Let him summon feelings of benevolence and unselfishness, making this a regular exercise like swinging dumb-bells. Let him gradually increase the time devoted to these psychical gymnastics until it reaches sixty or ninety minutes per diem. At the end of a month he will find the change in himself surprising. The alteration will be apparent in his actions and thoughts. It will have registered in the cell structure of his brain.”

There are many ways of ruining the body besides smoking or getting drunk, or indulging in other sensual vices. Anger changes the chemical properties of the saliva to a poison dangerous to life. It is well known that sudden and violent emotions have not only weakened the heart in a few hours, but have also caused death and insanity.

It has been discovered by scientists that there is a chemical difference between that sudden cold exudation of a person under a deep sense of guilt, and the ordinary perspiration; and the state of the mind of a criminal can sometimes be determined by chemical analysis of the perspiration, which, when brought into contact with selenic acid, produces a distinctive pink color.

“Suppose half a dozen men in a room,” says Professor Gates; “one feels depressed, another remorseful, another ill-tempered, another jealous, another cheerful, another benevolent. Samples of their perspiration are placed in the hands of the psychophysicist. Under his examination they reveal all those emotional conditions distinctly and unmistakably.”

It is well known that fear has killed thousands of victims, while, on the other hand, courage is a great restorer.

Anger in the mother may poison a nursing child. Rarey, the celebrated horse-tamer, said that an angry word would sometimes raise the pulse of a horse ten beats in a minute. Experiments with dogs show similar results.

If this is true of a beast, what can we say of its power upon human beings, especially upon a child? Strong mental emotion often causes vomiting. Extreme anger or fright may produce jaundice. A violent paroxysm of rage has caused apoplexy and death. Indeed, in more than one instance, a single night of mental agony has wrecked a life.

The Almighty never intended that we should be the sport of our passions, or the victims of harmful suggestions. The power of mastery is within ourselves, but we must develop it, cultivate it, use it.

That man is truly great who can rule his mental kingdom, who at will can master his moods; who knows enough of mental chemistry to neutralize a fit of the “blues,” to antidote any evil, poisonous thought with the opposite thought, just as a chemist neutralizes an acid which is eating into his flesh by applying an alkaline antidote. A man ignorant of chemistry might apply another acid which would eat still deeper into his flesh; but the chemist knows the antidote of the particular acid that is doing the mischief, and can kill its corrosive, eating quality in an instant.

So the mental chemist knows how to counteract the corrosive, wearing, tearing power of the despondent, depressing thought by its cheerful antidote. He knows that the optimistic thought is sure death to the pessimistic thought; that harmony will quickly neutralize any form of discord; that the health thought will antidote the ailing, sick thought; that the love thought will kill the hatred thought, the jealous, revengeful thought. He does not need to suffer mental anguish, because he always has his mental remedy with him. The moment he applies its antidote, the fatal corrosive power of the malignant thought is neutralized.

If children were taught mental chemistry, as they are taught physical chemistry, there would be no ailing pessimists, no victims of the “blues.” We should not see so many long, dejected, gloomy faces everywhere. We should not see so many criminals, so many sorrowful, tragic failures in every rank of society, in every walk of life.

Many of us keep our minds more or less poisoned much of the time because of our ignorance of mental chemistry. We suffer from mental self-poison and do not know it. Neither do we know how to antidote the poison passions which are working havoc in our bodies.

Nothing else will so exhaust the vitality and whittle away life as violent fits of hatred, bitter jealousy, or a determination for revenge. We see the victims of these passions worn out, haggard, old, even before they have reached middle life. There are cases on record where fierce jealousy and hatred raging through the system aged the victims by years in a few days or weeks.

Yet these mental poisons are just as easily antidoted, conquered, as physical poisons which have well-known antidotes. If we are sick with a fever we go to a physician for an antidote; but when jealousy or hatred is raging within us we suffer tortures until the fever gradually wears itself out, not knowing that by an application of love which would quickly antidote it, we could easily have avoided not only the suffering but also the wear and tear of the entire system, especially of the delicate brain structure.

As there is no filth, no impurity, in any water which cannot be removed by the science of chemistry, so there is no human mind so filthy, so poisoned with vicious thinking and vicious habits, so saturated with vice, that it cannot be cleared up by right thinking; by the counter suggestion of the thing that has polluted it.

It is the poison-specialist’s, the toxicologist’s duty to know what will antidote every kind of poison. He would not try to save a patient from arsenic poison with the antidote for morphine. He must have the arsenic antidote, and he can tell by the symptoms in each case what poison has been taken.

Many a precious life has been lost which could have been saved if people around the victim at the time had only known the antidote of the poison taken. I have known a man poisoned with carbolic acid to be given the antidote for prussic acid, which, of course, did not save the patient, because it was not the right antidote.

The time will come when every intelligent person will be expert enough in mental chemistry to be able to apply the proper antidotes for special forms of mental poisoning.

We shall find that it is just as easy to counteract an unfriendly, disagreeable, vicious thought by turning on the counter thought, as it is to rob the hot water of its burning power by turning on the cold-water faucet. We shall be able to regulate the temperature of our thought as the temperature of water. If the water is too hot we simply turn on the cold faucet. If we feel our brain heating up with hot temper, we shall simply turn on the love thought, the peace thought, and the anger heat will be instantly counteracted.

In other words, it is perfectly possible, and not very difficult, to absolutely control the quality of the thought, to regulate our peace of mind, to maintain poise and balance, a sweet, peaceful mental serenity, under the most trying circumstances.

It will be absolutely impossible, by any kind of aggravation or work or passion or torture, to disturb the balance, the dignified serenity, of the coming man. It will be impossible to make him suffer, because he knows the secret of counteracting the vicious, harmful thought so that it will be neutralized or will fall flat. If the coming man feels the “blues” coming on, he will be able to counteract this condition in an instant. He will know how to stop the eating of the acid thought with the alkali thought. If he feels a sense of weakness coming on he will immediately annihilate it by a flood thought of strength and robustness—vigor.

Think, for example, how many human ills can be antidoted by the magical chemistry of the love thought! It is a solvent for selfishness and greed, a destroyer of hatred, envy, and jealousy, of revenge, criminal intent, and a score of other mental and physical enemies.

Think what it would mean if we could only keep the mind filled with loving, helpful, hopeful, encouraging, cheerful, fearless suggestions! We would not then need to deny their opposites, for, when the positive is present, the negative flees.

We cannot drive the darkness out of a room. We let in the light and the darkness flees.

The way to get rid of discord is to flood the mind with harmony; then the discord vanishes, as darkness flees before the light.

The way to get despondency and discouragement out of the mind is to fill it with encouraging, hopeful, cheerful pictures. Discouragement and despondency are killed by their opposites. They are the natural antidotes.

An acid is instantly killed by the presence of an alkali. Fire cannot exist in the presence of its opposite, carbonic-acid gas or water. We cannot drive hatred, jealousy, revenge out of the mind by will power, by trying to force them out. Love is the alkali which will immediately neutralize, antidote them.

Hatred cannot live an instant in the presence of love. The Golden Rule will kill all jealousy and revenge. They cannot live together.

The trouble with most people is that they try to drive out the bad in themselves instead of antidoting it with the good. They try to force hatred out of their minds without the assistance of its antidote.

Change the mental attitude—think love, feel love for that object which we hated, and the hatred is instantly neutralized. Whenever you are timid, inclined to express doubt, fear or anxiety in any form, expel these destructive suggestions with their counter suggestions.

Remember that every morbid mood, every discordant, weak thought is a symptom of a poisoned mind. You have the antidote—just the opposite thought. Your mind remedy is always present. The antidote for all error is truth, for all discord, is harmony. You do not have to pay a physician. You have your own recipe always with you. When you have learned the secrets of mental chemistry you can instantly stop every symptom and check every approach of mind disease.

Every true, beautiful, and helpful thought is a suggestion which, if held in the mind, tends to reproduce itself there—clarifies the ideals and uplifts the life. While these inspiring and helpful suggestions fill the mind their opposites cannot put in their deadly work, because the two cannot live together. They are mutually antagonistic, natural enemies. One excludes the other.

I know a woman of beautiful character who has acquired the art of quickly refreshing her mind even in the most trying and exacting conditions. Knowing the power of mental images to renew the mind, she has made a study of her thought enemies and learned to eliminate all those which suggest dark, unfortunate images, by dwelling on their opposites—those which bring beautiful, cheerful, uplifting, encouraging pictures to her mind.

By cherishing one and excluding the other, she freshens and clarifies her thought and rejuvenates her life at will.

Through her thorough knowledge and practice of mental chemistry, she has been able to maintain a calm, sweet serenity, a cheerful mental balance and harmony of disposition which endears her to all who know her.

The human body is made exclusively of cells. We are nothing but a mass of cells of twelve different varieties, such as brain cells, bone cells, muscle cells, etc. The maximum of health and power depends upon the absolute integrity of every cell. Sickness and disease simply mean that some of the cells in the body are impaired.

Many people seem to think that thought only affects the brain; but the fact is we think all over.

Physiologists have found gray brain matter in the tips of the fingers of the blind. The marvellous feats of the blind; the fact that they can distinguish most delicate textures, denominations of money, colors, even fine tints, shades, all show that thinking is not confined to the brain. We think all over.

The body is a sort of extended brain. Every thought that enters the brain cells is quickly communicated to every cell in the entire body, thus accounting for the tremendous instantaneous influence of a shock caused by fatal news or some terrible catastrophe to every part of the body, instantly affecting all the secretions and functions.

The effect of bad news in a telegram often instantly affects the heart, stomach, and brain. This explains the numerous cases in medical history where the hair has turned white in a few hours, sometimes in a few minutes, from the shock of bad news. The transmission of the shock from the brain to every cell in the body is almost instantaneous.

The billions of cells in the body are all tied together in the closest contact—by affinity, sympathy. What injures or helps one, injures or helps all. Every cell suffers or is a gainer, gets a life impulse or a death impulse, according to the character of the thought.

It has been established by experiments that we pay for all our unfortunate, vicious thinking in impaired cell life. Innumerable experiments have established the fact that all healthful, hopeful, joyous, encouraging, uplifting, optimistic, cheerful thoughts improve the cell life of the entire body. They are creative, while the opposite thoughts are destructive of cell life.

When we learn the fact that every thought and emotion is quickly registered, even in the remotest cell in the body, then we shall learn to be extremely careful of the character of the thought and the emotion. We shall then know that the harboring of sick, discouraged, despondent thoughts, thoughts of fear, worry, jealousy, hatred, anger, and selfishness, will deteriorate the integrity of the entire cell life, and that the health standards will not only drop, but that our mental and physical energy alike will be diminished accordingly. We shall then know that the health thought, the robust, vigorous thought will react upon and give an uplift to every cell in the body.

The greatest work a human being can do is to keep his entire cell life in the superbest possible condition. Then he will be absolutely normal; and when normal he will be right, truthful, honest, sincere, noble.

Much of the unhappiness, the inefficiency and the wretched, slipshod work, much of the crime of the world, are due to impaired cell life from vicious, unscientific thinking.

When a person is perfectly normal, he has no desire to do wrong. It is when his cell life is demoralized by bad thinking, which leads to vicious living, dissipated habits, that he is tempted to go wrong. So, not only the highest morality, the supremest happiness, but the highest efficiency, depend upon the healthy condition of the cell life.

How comparatively easy it would be to do right and to be successful if the body were always in the best condition!

It is when the cell life is demoralized that the standard is lowered; it is because we are abnormal, that we are tempted to vicious living. The blood is poisoned from vicious thinking and we go wrong in spite of ourselves.

Every individual is afloat in a sea of thought, where currents are running in every direction. When we are subject to all sorts of opposing influences, conflicting thought-currents, we soon come to grief in this turbulent sea, if we do not know the laws of mental chemistry. We must know how to neutralize our enemy thoughts by applying their antidotes. We must be able to master our moods, to direct our thoughts, and thus protect our lives from all evil influences within and without.

One of the great problems in establishing wireless telegraphy was the neutralizing or getting rid of the influence of conflicting currents going in every direction through the atmosphere. The great problem of character-building, life-building, is to counteract, to nullify conflicting thought-currents, discordant thought-currents, which bring all sorts of bad, injurious suggestions to the mind. Tens of thousands have already solved this problem. Everyone can apply mental chemistry, the right thought-current to neutralize the wrong one.

He is a fortunate man who early learns the secret of scientific mental culture, and who acquires the inestimable art of holding the right suggestion in his mind, so that he can triumph over the dominant note in his environment when it is unfriendly to his highest good.

There is nothing truer than that “we can make ourselves over by using and developing the right kind of thought-forces.”

Not long ago a young man whom I had not seen for several years called on me, and I was amazed at the tremendous change in him. When I had last seen him he was pessimistic, discouraged, almost despairing; he had soured on life, lost confidence in human nature and in himself. During the interval he had completely changed. The sullen, bitter expression that used to characterize his face was replaced by one of joy and gladness. He was radiant, cheerful, hopeful, and happy.

The young man had married an optimistic wife, who had the happy faculty of laughing him out of his “blues” or melancholy, changing the tenor of his thoughts, cheering him up, and making him put a higher estimate on himself. His removal from an unhappy environment, together with his wife’s helpful “new-thought” influence and his own determination to make good, had all worked together to bring about a revolution in his mental make-up. The love-principle and the use of the right thought-force had verily made a new man of him.

We are beginning to learn that man carries the great panacea for all ills within himself; that the antidotes for the worst poisons—the poisons of hatred, jealousy, anger, revenge, a false ambition, and of all evil thoughts and passions—exist in his own mind in the form of love, charity, and good-will essences.

VII. IMAGINATION AND HEALTH

OT long ago a clergyman was sent to a hospital, suffering terribly, and so weak that he could scarcely hold up his head. He said he had swallowed several false teeth and the plate, and that he felt the horrible grinding and cutting of these in his stomach.

The physician in attendance tried to talk him out of this idea, but to no purpose. A little while later a telegram from his wife informed him that the teeth had been found under the bed. Mortified and chagrined at having made such a fool of himself, the clergyman, free from his imaginary suffering, immediately got up, dressed himself, paid his bill and went home without assistance.

As long as the man was convinced that the false teeth were in his stomach, all the talking in the world could not have made him believe that his suffering was a delusion. This conviction had to be changed first.

Physicians tell us that susceptibility to contagious diseases depends very largely upon the mental condition, that it is possible for a person during great excitement to work with perfect immunity among patients suffering from the most malignant diseases.

I have seen a vigorous, athletic man so completely paralyzed by the shock from an accident that he could scarcely lift a pound weight. He was as weak and nerveless as a child. No material substance had touched him or opposed him—just a terrifying thought, which came like lightning, did the work, made a pygmy of a giant in an instant.

Well-authenticated cases have been recorded by physicians where patients, who had a mortal fear of chloroform, went into syncope before a whiff of chloroform had been given. They became perfectly unconscious through the suggestion of their own minds.

I know of a physician who, while away from home on a fishing trip, was summoned to attend a patient who was suffering indescribable agony. He had no medicine case, no drugs with him; but the tactful physician, knowing the power of suggestion, made small powders out of ordinary flour and gave instructions with the greatest care as to the exact time and manner of taking. They were to be given every few minutes.

The patient was told that he was being treated by a noted physician, and his great faith in the physician and the remedy in a short time wrought a marvellous change in his condition. He said that he felt the effects of the medicine throughout his entire being. Flour and faith did the work.

In the medical report, after the great epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia, we find this reference to the remarkable healing balm in the spiritual influence of the great Dr. Rush.

“Dr. Rush’s presence was a powerful stimulant; men recovered to whom he gave no medicine, as if his word was enough to turn the fever.”

The sick thought must go before the sick condition will depart. When the diseased thought goes, the body at once rebounds and becomes normal.

I recently heard of a young lady who, while at the theatre with her fiancé, complained suddenly of feeling faint. Her fiancé, a young doctor, took something out of his pocket, and, giving it to her, whispered, “Keep this tabloid in your mouth, but don’t swallow it.” The young lady did as directed, and immediately felt better. Curious to know what the “tabloid” was, which, although it had not dissolved, had given her such relief, she examined it on her return home, and found—a small button!

Medical history shows that thousands of people have died the victims of their imagination. They were convinced they had diseases which in reality they never had. The trouble was not in the body but in the mind.

Few of us realize the almost superhuman power of the imagination in its effect upon the body. Nothing is better known than that many people every year die with imaginary hydrophobia. It is a very common thing to regard a dog as mad which simply has a fit, or is so frightened at being pursued by those who are afraid of it, and who project their state of mind to its brain that it appears to be mad.

A short time ago I read a story about a young officer in India who consulted a great physician because he felt fagged from the excessive heat and long hours of service. The physician examined him and said he would write to him on the morrow. The letter the patient received informed him that his left lung was entirely gone, his heart seriously affected, and advised him to adjust his business affairs at once. “Of course, you may live for weeks,” it said, “but you had best not leave important matters undecided.”

Naturally the young officer was dismayed by this death warrant. He grew rapidly worse, and in twenty-four hours respiration was difficult and he had an acute pain in the region of the heart. He took to his bed with the conviction that he should never rise from it. During the night he grew rapidly worse and his servant sent for the doctor.

“What on earth have you been doing to yourself?” demanded the physician. “There was no indication of this sort when I saw you yesterday.”

“It is my heart, I suppose,” weakly answered the patient in a whisper.

“Your heart!” repeated the doctor. “Your heart was all right yesterday.”

“My lungs, then,” said the patient.

“What is the matter with you, man? You don’t seem to have been drinking.”

“Your letter, your letter!” gasped the patient. “You said I had only a few weeks to live.”

“Are you crazy?” said the doctor. “I wrote you to take a week’s vacation in the hills and you would be all right.”

The patient, with the pallor of death in his face, could scarcely raise his head from the pillows, but he drew from under the bed-clothes the doctor’s letter.

“Heavens, man!” cried the physician; “this was meant for another patient! My assistant misplaced the letters.”

The young officer sat up in bed immediately, and was entirely well in a few hours.

When I was in the Harvard Medical School, one of the best professors there, a celebrated physician, who had been lecturing upon the power of the imagination, warned the students against the dangers of imagining that they themselves had the disease about which they studied. During this very time the professor told me that he got it into his head that he was developing Bright’s disease in his own system. This conviction became so strong that he did not even dare to have an examination made. He was so certain that he was in the grasp of this so-called fatal disease that he preferred to die rather than be told of his condition by another physician. He lost his appetite, lost flesh rapidly, and became almost incapable of lecturing, until one day a medical friend, astonished at the change in his appearance, asked what was the matter with him.

“I have Bright’s disease,” was the reply. “I am sure of it, for I have every symptom.”

“Nonsense,” said his friend; “you have nothing of the kind.”

After a great deal of persuasion, the professor was induced to submit to an examination, and it was discovered that there was not the slightest evidence of Bright’s disease in his system. He rallied so quickly that even in a day those who knew him noticed the change. His appetite returned, his flesh came back, and he was a new man.

Medical history is full of examples of people who have been made sick purely through the domination of the imagination. A London medical journal gives the following instances:

“Two London men stayed in the country at a house where scarlet fever was reported. One, an unimaginative, healthy-minded fellow, awoke all right in the morning. The other, a nervous, sensitive man, was very ill—had not slept and had broken out into a terrible rash, which both declared to be scarlet fever. A wire to a London medical man was despatched, and by the first train he hurried down. The supposed fever patient proved to have no fever at all beyond an imaginative one. In fact, there was no scarlet fever in the house. The case had been wrongly diagnosed, and the frightened visitor had tortured himself into a violent rash, all without cause.

“At another house two men stayed, where an inmate had died of cholera. One man placed in the room in which the patient had died was in ignorance of what had occurred. He slept well and was no worse. The other, wrongly told that the room in which he slept was that in which the cholera patient had died, spent a night of mental agony and in the morning was actually found to be suffering from this complaint. He died of cholera.”

People read these stories and believe them, yet cannot see that their own perverted imaginations, their own sick, discordant, discouraged thoughts will produce similar effects upon themselves.

We are all at some time in our lives victims of the imagination. The conviction that we have been exposed to a terrible malady, to some incurable, contagious disease, completely upsets the entire system and reverses the processes of the various functions; the mind does not act with its customary vitality and power and there is a general dropping of physical and mental standards all along the line, until we become the victims of the thing we fear.

VIII. HOW SUGGESTION INFLUENCES
HEALTH

OMEONE has said: “The mortalest enemy you can have is the friend who meets you and says: ‘You are not looking well to-day; what’s the matter?’ From that moment you don’t feel well. Your friend has blasted your hope and spread a pall over your brain.”

The power of suggestion is strikingly illustrated by the fact that a hypnotic subject under control may be burned until a blister is raised, by the application of a cold coin.

Now, if it is possible for the thought suggested by another to produce a blister on the body, it does not seem strange that a suggestion can cause or cure dyspepsia and other ills. If it is possible to make the hypnotic subject stagger and reel like a drunken man, just by holding in his mind the suggestion that a glass of pure water he drank was whiskey, it is certainly possible to produce all sorts of effects by mental suggestion.

Some examples of the marvellous power of suggestion are given by Dr. Frederik Van Eden, a graduate of medicine at the University of Amsterdam, and an advocate of the psychotherapeutic method of healing the sick. In speaking of Professor Debove, of Paris, an authority in such cases, he said:

“At his clinic in the hospital of St. Andral he showed me how he could give a patient a glass of water, telling him that it was wine, and how the patient took it for wine. I saw how he told a man that a cold silver spoon was glowing hot, and how the man dropped it with every token of burning pain. How he gave another a book and said: ‘Look at it; it’s all white paper! all blank! . . . Now blow on it. Look again!—it’s all portraits, all portraits! Now blow again!—all landscapes and pictures! Look!’ And the man saw everything in great amazement, and even described the landscapes and portraits which nobody saw but himself. ‘Well, I never saw magic like this,’ said the man.

“ ‘I’ll do better,’ said Debove. ‘Shut your eyes. When you open them, I have no head.’ And as the man looked up he stared at the professor with a wild, scared look. ‘Well,’ said Debove, ‘how do you like me without my head?’ And the poor man struck his own head with a violent blow and said: ‘For sure, I have gone mad!’ ”

I have seen an experiment tried on a horse, to make him believe he was sick. He was covered with blankets, rubbed with medicines, pitied and petted until he lost his appetite, and could not be induced to eat or drink. Another perfectly sound horse was so thoroughly convinced, in a short time, by the holding up of his foot, feeling of it, bandaging it, and rubbing it with liniment, that he was lame, that he actually limped when he attempted to walk.

It is well known that the fears, the anxieties, and the worries of mothers have a great deal to do with the diseases of their children.

The expectant mental attitude of nervous mothers who are always on the lookout for the enemies of their darlings tends to invite, to attract, the very things they fear. Constantly watching for symptoms of any disease that happens to be in their neighborhood, the mental pictures photographed on their brains are quickly communicated to the impressionable mind of the child and impair his bodily functions.

In a home which I visited recently, the mother kept telling her little boy how ill he looked, asking him how he felt, and giving him doses of this and doses of that. At least half a dozen times during the evening she asked the different children of the family how they felt, if they had a headache or a cold. She was worried all the time about them; afraid they would get into draughts, go outdoors bareheaded, or get their feet wet. She was constantly warning them to avoid these things, and telling them that if they didn’t they would get croup, or pneumonia, or something terrible would happen to them. In other words, she kept the picture of physical discord constantly in the minds of her children. The result was that some member of the family was sick most of the time. The mother said she could not go out much because there was so much sickness in her family.

The father was almost as bad as the mother in worrying about the health of the family. He would call his little boy to him, feel his pulse, tell him his skin was hot, that he was feverish; he would look at his tongue and remark that he was a sick boy. The result was the boy actually thought himself sick and had to go to bed.

How little parents realize the harm they do in projecting their own discordant thoughts and fears into their children’s receptive minds, thus tending to develop the very thing they are trying to avoid!

Think of children being brought up in such an atmosphere of fear and anxiety and disease-picturing, constantly warned of danger, and cautioned all the time not to do this or that, until they begin to think there are very few things that a person can do with safety! They grow up with a terrible fear of disease that becomes a perpetual nightmare.

If parents only knew what an unmitigated curse fear of disease is, they would try to drive it out of their children’s minds; they never would picture symptoms of physical discord of any kind.

We are just beginning to appreciate the marvellous power of suggestion to uplift or depress the mind. Only recently I heard a very intelligent woman say that she was forced to take to her bed for the greater part of a day because of the depressing influence of a magazine story she had just read. The story was written by a famous writer. It was strong, but brutal. It appealed to what was morbid in her mind and completely prostrated her.

It is common for medical students to become ill through the horrible suggestions of the dissecting rooms, and the depressing influence which comes from the constant study of disease conditions.

On the other hand, the constant mental contact with cheerful, hopeful, health thoughts, must tend to reproduce the corresponding qualities in the body.

The mind of a sick person is in more or less of a helpless, subjective, negative condition, and is very susceptible to thought influences, good or bad. In health, the positive, creative mental attitude gives the mind the power of resistance, which protects it from its enemies.

Most of us know what a glorious uplift and stimulus we have received when ill, from a call from one who is cheerful and optimistic, and who injects hope and courage into us. And we know how we dread to have some people call on us when we are ill, because they rob us of hope and leave us in such a dejected mood by their long faces and pessimistic minds. They always leave the depressing shadows of gloom and discouragement behind them.

Sick people, like children, require a great deal of encouragement. They want hope held out to them.

Imagine what an uplift it would be to a patient if his physician, nurse, relatives, and friends were all trying to radiate hope, good cheer, and courage, as will be the common custom in the future!

The cheerful, optimistic physician, who is always reassuring his patients, arousing their healing energies (potencies which are in all of us), telling them how well they look, holding out hope to them, and trying to cheer them up, has a powerful influence for good. The optimism of many physicians is worth infinitely more to their patients than all the remedies they prescribe.

I once knew two physicians in hospitals in Boston who illustrated this point. One was an extreme optimist with a keen sense of humor. He was always cracking jokes with the patients, cheering them up, and telling funny stories. The whole atmosphere of the wards was entirely changed after he had passed through them. His bright, cheerful face and sunny optimism gave the patients a great uplift.

The other physician was morose, stern, silent, profound, a man of great learning but of few words and who seldom smiled. If he found a patient not looking quite so well as usual he did not hesitate to tell him so, and that he was losing ground.

He was conscientious and always said what he thought, even when it was cruel. The sick one, thus discouraged, would often immediately lose heart and collapse.

Physicians little realize how implicitly patients pin their faith to them and how closely they watch their faces for signs of encouragement, a ray of hope.

The most advanced physicians of all schools are beginning to see the uplifting force and healing power in a patient’s own confidence in his recovery.

Some conscientious physicians think they should always tell the patient exactly how he is, that it is his right to know, especially when in extreme danger. Now, there might be reason in this if the physician were omniscient, if he never erred in his diagnosis, if he could measure with exactitude every force acting in the man; but even the most learned physicians feel that they know comparatively little about the human mechanism. They know that patients often recover after eminent physicians in consultation have given up all hope. Why should they not give the patient the benefit of a doubt, especially when they know the power of a depressing thought or unfavorable verdict on one in an extremely weak condition? Does a physician owe his patient a greater duty than to help him all he can to recover? There is a great healing power in hope, in confidence.

The influence of the strong mind of the physician on the weak, discouraged, exhausted patient is far-reaching and he should give him as much mental uplift and hope as possible. There are times when a physician owes his patient an infinitely greater duty than to tell him the truth, or what he believes to be the truth.

The power of suggestion on expectant minds is often little less than miraculous. An invalid with a disappointed ambition, who thinks he has been robbed of his chances in life, and who has suffered for years, becomes all wrought up over some new remedy which is advertised to do marvels. He is in such an expectant state of mind that he is willing to make any sacrifice to obtain the remedy, and when he gets it, he is in such a receptive mood that he responds quickly to the suggestion and thinks it is the medicine he has taken which has worked the magic.

Religious history is full of examples of people who have been cured by going to famed springs, by bathing in sacred waters, or streams supposed to have great curative qualities.

People who go to health resorts attribute their improvement to change of air or to the waters they drink, when, as a matter of fact, it has probably been wrought by change of environment, change of mental suggestion, as much as by the change of air or water.

Buoyancy of mind, courage, hope, and cheerfulness are factors that far outweigh drugs in the cure of the sick, and should be encouraged in every possible way.

The trouble with us is that we do not realize the omnipotent remedies that lie within our own minds. There is not a human ill which does not have its specific remedy—not a palliative, but an absolute cure—named in the Bible.

Nothing is more strongly emphasized in the Sacred Book than the fact that love heals. We have suggestions of this in the balm of the mother love which soothes and cures the child’s fears and all its little hurts and ills. How naturally the child runs to the mother for a kiss to heal its bruises, and into the shelter of her arms to ward off whatever it fears!

If the child feels this healing power of the mother love, what shall we say of the potency of divine love—love that is selfless? The Bible assures us that “perfect love casteth out fear,” and fear is one of the most potent sources of discord and disease.

What better remedy could be imagined for those suffering from fear—the greatest enemy of the human race—than is to be found in the study and application of the ninety-first psalm? Could anything be more reassuring than the opening words of this grand psalm—“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty”?

There is no fear, no fit of the “blues,” no despondency or discouragement, which this psalm, if properly studied and applied, would not cure. Think what its realization would mean to those who are in the very depths of despair. Could there be any other refuge such as that “under the shadow of the Almighty”?

He who lives close to God (good), who abides in His love, fears nothing, is not worried or anxious, because he feels always the protection of omnipotent Power and infinite Wisdom.

A few passages from the Scriptures will show how freely and fully abundant life, health, strength—all good things—are promised to those who heed the words of God, who love Him and put their faith in Him.

Attend to my words. . . . For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.—Prov. iv, 20, 22.

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.—Isaiah xl, 31.

He sent his word and healed them.—Psalm cvii, 20.

I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.—Psalm xxx, 2.

His flesh shall be fresher than a child’s.—Job xxxiii, 25.

For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds.—Jer. xxx, 17.

Behold, I will heal thee.—II Kings xx, 5.

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily.—Isaiah lviii, 8.

I am the Lord that healeth thee.—Exodus xv, 26.

There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.—Rev. xxi, 4.

“Neither shall any plague” (discord or harm) “come nigh thy dwelling” (Psalm xci, 10), is the promise to him that “dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High” (Psalm xci, 1).

Let thine heart keep my commandments: For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.—Prov. iii, 1-3.

When we are thoroughly intrenched in the conviction of our unity with the All-good; when we realize that we do not take on health from outside by acquiring it, but that we are health; that we do not absorb a bit of justice, here and there, but that we are justice; that we do not take on truth, a little here and a little there, but that we are truth itself, principle, then we shall really begin to live.

I believe that most people are conscious of a power deep in their nature which would remedy all their ills if they only knew how to get hold of it. We all feel that there is something divine in us, something in the flesh that is not of it, a power back of the flesh that will ultimately redeem us and bring us into the state of blessedness which we instinctively feel is the right of the children of the King of kings. The great end of life is to train ourselves to find this creative, rejuvenating, life-giving force and to apply it to our every-day life.

IX. WHY GROW OLD?

OT long ago the former secretary to a justice of the New York Supreme Court committed suicide on his seventieth birthday.

“The Statute of Limitations; a Brief Essay on the Osler Theory of Life,” was found beside the dead body. It read in part:

“Threescore and ten—this is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that, active work for man ceases, his time on earth has expired. . . .

“I am seventy—threescore and ten—and I am fit only for the chimney-corner. . . .”

This man had dwelt so long on the so-called Osler theory—that a man is practically useless and only a burden to himself and the world after sixty—and the biblical limitation of life to threescore years and ten, that he made up his mind he would end it all on his seventieth birthday.

Leaving aside Dr. Osler’s theory, there is no doubt that the acceptance in a strictly literal sense of the biblical life limit has proved a decided injury to the race. We are powerfully influenced by our self-imposed limitations and convictions, and it is well known that many people die very near the limit they set for themselves, even though they are in good health when this conviction settles upon them. Yet there is no probability that the Psalmist had any idea of setting any limit to the life period, or that he had any authority whatever for so doing. Many of the sayings in the Bible which people take so literally and accept blindly as standards of living are merely figures of speech used to illustrate an idea. So far as the Bible is concerned, there is just as much reason for setting the life limit at one hundred and twenty or even at Methuselah’s age (nine hundred and sixty-nine) as at seventy or eighty. There is no evidence in the Scriptures that even suggests the existence of an age limit beyond which man was not supposed or allowed to pass.

In fact the whole spirit of the Bible is to encourage long life through sane and healthful living. It points to the duty of living a useful and noble life, of making as much of ourselves as possible, all of which tends to prolong our years on earth.

It would be a reflection upon the Creator to suggest that He would limit human life to less than three times the age at which it reaches maturity (about thirty) when all the analogy of nature, especially in the animal kingdom, points to at least five times the length of the maturing period. Should not the highest manifestation of God’s creation have a length of life at least equal to that of the animal? Infinite wisdom does not shake the fruit off the tree before it is ripe.

We do not half realize what slaves we are to our mental attitudes, what power our convictions have to influence our lives. Multitudes of people undoubtedly shorten their lives by many years because of their deep-seated convictions that they will not live beyond a certain age—the age, perhaps, at which their parents died. How often we hear this said: “I do not expect to live to be very old; my father and mother died young.”

Not long ago a New York man, in perfect health, told his family that he was certain he should die on his next birthday. On the morning of his birthday his family, alarmed because he refused to go to work, saying that he should certainly die before midnight, insisted upon calling in the family physician, who examined him and said there was nothing the matter with him. But the man refused to eat, grew weaker and weaker during the day, and actually died before midnight. The conviction that he was going to die had become so intrenched in his mind that the whole force of his mentality acted to cut off the life force, and finally to strangle completely the life processes.

Now, if this man’s conviction could have been changed by some one who had sufficient power over him, or if the mental suggestion that he was going to live to a good old age had been implanted in his mind in place of the death idea, he would probably have lived many years longer.

If you have convinced yourself, or if the idea has been ingrained into the very structure of your being by your training or the multitudes of examples about you, that you will begin to show the marks of age at about fifty, that at sixty you will lose the power of your faculties, your interest in life; that you will become practically useless and have to retire from your business, and that thereafter you will continue to decline until you are cut off entirely, there is no power in the world that can keep the old-age processes and signs from developing in you.

Thought leads. If it is an old-age thought, old age must follow. If it is a youthful thought, a perennial young-life thought, a thought of usefulness and helpfulness, the body must correspond. Old age begins in the mind. The expression of age in the body is the harvest of old-age ideas which have been planted in the mind. We see others about our age beginning to decline and show marks of decrepitude, and we imagine it is about time for us to show the same signs. Ultimately we do show them, because we think they are inevitable. But they are only inevitable because of our old-age mental attitude and race habit beliefs.

If we actually refuse to grow old; if we insist on holding the youthful ideal and the young, hopeful, buoyant thought, the old-age ear-marks will not show themselves.

The elixir of youth lies in the mind or nowhere. You cannot be young by trying to appear so, by dressing youthfully. You must first get rid of the last vestige of thought that you are aging. As long as that is in the mind, cosmetics and youthful dress will amount to very little in changing your appearance. The conviction must first be changed; the thought which has produced the aging condition must be reversed.

If we can only establish the perpetual-youth mental attitude, so that we feel young, we have won half the battle against old age. Be sure of this, that whatever you feel regarding your age will be expressed in your body.

It is a great aid to the perpetuation of youth to learn to feel young, however long we may have lived, because the body expresses the habitual feeling, habitual thought. Nothing in the world will make us look young as long as we are convinced that we are aging.

Nothing else more effectually retards age than the keeping in mind the bright, cheerful, optimistic, hopeful, buoyant picture of youth, in all its splendor, magnificence; the picture of the glories which belong to youth—youthful dreams, ideals, hopes, and all the qualities which belong to young life.

One great trouble with us is that our imaginations age prematurely. The hard, exacting conditions of our modern, strenuous life tend to harden and dry up the brain and nerve cells, and thus seriously injure the power of the imagination, which should be kept fresh, buoyant, elastic. The average routine habit of modern business life tends to destroy the flexibility, the delicacy, the sensitiveness, the exquisite fineness of the perceptive faculties.

People who take life too seriously, who seem to think everything depends upon their own individual efforts, whose lives are one continuous grind in living-getting, have a hard expression, their thought outpictures itself in their faces. These people dry up early in life, become wrinkled; their tissues become as hard as their thought.

The arbitrary, domineering, overbearing mind also tends to age the body prematurely, because the thinking is hard, strained, abnormal.

People who live on the sunny and beautiful side of life, who cultivate serenity, do not age nearly so rapidly as do those who live on the shady, the dark side.

Another reason why so many people age prematurely is because they cease to grow. It is a lamentable fact that multitudes of men seem incapable of receiving or accepting new ideas after they have reached middle age. Many of them, after they have reached the age of forty or fifty, come to a standstill in their mental reaching out.

Don’t think that you must “begin to take in sail,” to stop growing, stop progressing, just because you have gotten along in years. By this method of reasoning you will decline rapidly. Never allow yourself to get out of the habit of being young. Do not say that you cannot do this or that as you once did. Live the life that belongs to youth. Do not be afraid of being a boy or girl again in spirit, no matter how many years you have lived. Carry yourself so that you will not suggest old age in any of its phases. Remember it is the stale mind, the stale mentality, that ages the body. Keep growing, keep interested in everything about you.

It has been shown that the conviction that one is going to die at about a certain time, a certain age, tends to bring about the expected dissolution by strangling the life processes.

If you wish to retain your youth, forget unpleasant experiences, disagreeable incidents. A lady eighty years old was recently asked how she managed to keep herself so youthful. She replied: “I know how to forget disagreeable things.”

No one can remain youthful who does not continue to grow, and no one can keep growing who does not keep alive his interest in the great world about him. We are so constituted that we draw a large part of our nourishment from others. No man can isolate himself, can cut himself off from his fellows, without shrinking in his mental stature. The mind that is not constantly reaching out for the new, as well as keeping in touch with the old, soon reaches its limit of growth.

Nothing else is easier than for a man to age. All he has to do is to think he is growing old; to expect it, to fear it, and prepare for it; to compare himself with others of the same age who are prematurely old and to assume that he is like them.

To think constantly of the “end,” to plan for death, to prepare and provide for declining years, is simply to acknowledge that your powers are waning, that you are losing your grip upon life. Such thinking tends to weaken your hold upon the life principle, and your body gradually corresponds with your conviction.

The very belief that our powers are waning; the consciousness that we are losing strength, that our vitality is lessening; the conviction that old age is settling upon us and that our life forces are gradually ebbing away, has a blighting, shrivelling influence upon the mental faculties and functions; the whole character deteriorates under this old-age belief.

The result is that we do not use or develop the age-resisting forces within us. The refreshening, renewing, resisting powers of the body are so reduced and impaired by the conviction that we are getting on in years and cannot stand what we once could, that we become an easy prey to disease and all sorts of physical infirmities.

The mental attitude has everything to do with the hastening or the retarding of the old-age condition.

Dr. Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, says that men should live at least one hundred and twenty years. There is no doubt that, as a race, we shorten our lives very materially through our false thinking, our bad living, and our old-age convictions.

A few years ago the London Lancet, the highest medical authority in the world, gave a splendid illustration of the power of the mind to keep the body young. A young woman, deserted by her lover, became insane. She lost all consciousness of the passing of time. She believed her lover would return, and for years she stood daily before her window watching for him. When over seventy years of age, some Americans, including physicians, who saw her, thought she was not over twenty. She did not have a single gray hair, and no wrinkles or other signs of age were visible. Her skin was as fair and smooth as a young girl’s. She did not age because she believed she was still a girl. She did not count her birthdays or worry because she was getting along in years. She was thoroughly convinced that she was still living in the very time that her lover left her. This mental belief controlled her physical condition. She was just as old as she thought she was. Her conviction outpictured itself in her body and kept it youthful.

It is an insult to your Creator that your brain should begin to ossify, that your mental powers should begin to decline when you have only reached the half-century milestone. You ought then to be in your youth. What has the appearance of old age to do with youth? What have gray hair, wrinkles, and other evidences of age to do with youth? Mental power should constantly increase. There should be no decline in years. Increasing wisdom and power should be the only signs that you have lived long, that you have been many years on this planet. Strength, beauty, magnificence, superiority, not weakness, uselessness, decrepitude, should characterize a man who has lived long.

As long as you hold the conviction that you are sixty, you will look it. Your thought will outpicture itself in your face, in your whole appearance. If you hold the old-age ideal, the old-age conviction, your expression must correspond. The body is the bulletin board of the mind.

On the other hand, if you think of yourself as perpetually young, vigorous, robust, and buoyant, because every cell in the body is constantly being renewed, decrepitude will not get hold of you.

If you would retain your youth, you must avoid the enemies of youth, and there are no greater enemies than the convictions of age and the gradual loss of interest in things, especially in youthful amusements and in the young life about you. When you are no longer interested in the hopes and ambitions of young people; when you decline to enter into their sports, to romp and play with children, you confess in effect that you are growing old; that you are beginning to harden; that your youthful spirits are drying up, and that the juices of your younger days are evaporating. Nothing helps more to the perpetuation of youth than much association with the young.

A man quite advanced in years was asked not long ago how he retained such a youthful appearance in spite of his age. He said that he had been the principal of a high school for over thirty years; that he loved to enter into the life and sports of the young people and to be one of them in their ambitions and interests. This, he said, had kept his mind centred on youth, progress, and abounding life, and the old-age thought had had no room for entrance.

There is not even a suggestion of age in this man’s conversation or ideas, and there is a life, a buoyancy about him which is wonderfully refreshing.

There must be a constant activity in the mind that would not age. “Keep growing or die” is nature’s motto, a motto written all over everything in the universe.

Hold stoutly to the conviction that it is natural and right for you to remain young. Constantly repeat to yourself that it is wrong, wicked for you to grow old in appearance; that weakness and decrepitude could not have been in the Creator’s plan for the man made in His image of perfection; that it must have been acquired—the result of wrong race and individual training and thinking.

Constantly affirm: “I am always well, always young, I cannot grow old except by producing the old-age conditions through my thought. The Creator intended me for continual growth, perpetual advancement and betterment, and I am not going to allow myself to be cheated out of my birthright of perennial youth.”

No matter if people do say to you: “You are getting along in years,” “You are beginning to show signs of age.” Just deny these appearances. Say to yourself: “Principle does not age, Truth does not grow old. I am Principle. I am Truth.”

Never go to sleep with the old-age picture or thought in your mind. It is of the utmost importance to make yourself feel young at night; to erase all signs, convictions, and feelings of age; to throw aside every care and worry that would carve its image on your brain and express itself in your face. The worrying mind actually generates calcareous matter in the brain and hardens the cells.

You should fall asleep holding those desires and ideals uppermost in the mind which are dearest to you; which you are the most anxious to realize. As the mind continues to work during sleep, these desires and ideals are thus intensified and increased. It is well known that impure thoughts and desires work terrible havoc then. Purity of thought, loftiness of purpose, the highest possible aims, should dominate the mind when you fall asleep.

When you first wake in the morning, especially if you have reached middle life or later, picture the youthful qualities as vividly as possible. Say to yourself: “I am young, always young—strong—buoyant. I cannot grow old and decrepit, because in the truth of my being I am divine, and Divine Principle cannot age. It is only the negative in me, the unreality, that can take on the appearance of age.”

The great thing is to make the mind create the youth pattern instead of the old-age pattern. As the sculptor follows the model which he holds in the mind, so the life processes reproduce in the body the pattern which is in our thought, our conviction.

We must get rid of the idea embedded in our very nature that the longer we live, the more experiences we have, the more work we do, the more inevitably we wear out and become old, decrepit, and useless. We must learn that living, acting, experiencing, should not exhaust life but create more life. It is a law that action increases force. Where, then, did the idea come from that man should wear out through action?

As a matter of fact, Nature has bestowed upon us perpetual youth, the power of perpetual renewal. There is not a single cell in our bodies that can possibly become old; the body is constantly being made new through cell-renewal, the cells of those parts of it that are most active being renewed oftenest. It must follow that the age-producing process is largely artificial and unnatural.

Physiologists tell us that the tissue cells of some muscles are renewed every few days, others every few weeks or months. The cells of the bone tissues are slower of renewal, but some authorities estimate that eighty or ninety per cent of all the cells in the body of a person of ordinary activity are entirely renewed in from six to twenty-four months.

Scientists have proved beyond question that the chemistry of the body has everything to do with the perpetuation of youthful conditions. Every discordant thought produces a chemical change in the cells, introducing foreign substances and causing reaction which is injurious to the integrity of the cells.

The impression of age is thus made upon new cells. This impression is the thought. If the thought is old, the age impress appears upon the cells. If the spirit of youth dominates the thought, the impression upon the cells is youthful. In other words, the processes which result in age cannot possibly operate except through the mind, and the billions of cells composing the body are instantly affected by every thought that passes through the brain.

Putting old thoughts into a new set of cells is like putting new wine into old bottles. They don’t agree; they are natural enemies. The result is that two-year-old cells are made to look fifty, sixty, or more years old, according to the thought. It is marvellous how quickly old thoughts can make new cells appear old.

All discordant and antagonistic thought materially interferes with the laws of reconstruction and self-renewal going on in the body, and the great thing is, therefore, to form thought habits which will harmonize with this law of rejuvenation—perpetual renewal.

Hard, selfish, worry, and fear thoughts, and vicious habits of all kinds, produce the appearance of age and hasten its coming.

Pessimism is one of the worst enemies of youth. The pessimist ages prematurely because his mind dwells upon the black, discordant, and diseased side of things. The pessimist does not progress, does not face toward youth; he goes backward, and this retrogression is fatal to youthful conditions. Brightness, cheerfulness, hopefulness characterize youth.

Everything that is abnormal tends to produce old-age conditions. No one can remain young, no matter to what expedients he may resort to enable him to erase the marks of age, who worries and indulges in excessive passion. The mental processes produce all sorts of things, good or bad, according to the pattern in the mind.

Selfishness is abnormal and tends to harden and dry up the brain and nerve cells. We are so constituted that we must be good to be happy, and happiness spells youthfulness. Selfishness is an enemy of happiness because it violates the very fundamental principle of our being—justice, fairness. We protest against it, we instinctively despise and think less of ourselves for practising it. It does not tend to produce health, harmony, or a sense of well-being, because it does not harmonize with the fundamental principle of our being.

With many people, old age is a perpetual horror, which destroys comfort and happiness and makes life a tragedy, which, but for it, might have been a perpetual joy.

Many wealthy people do not really enjoy their possessions because of that awful consciousness that they may at any moment be forced to leave everything.

Discordant thought of every kind tends to shorten life.

As long as you think old, hard, grasping, envious thoughts, nothing in the world can keep you from growing old. As long as you harbor these enemies of youth, you cannot remain in a youthful condition. New thoughts create new life; old thoughts—canned, stereotyped thoughts—are injurious to growth, and anything which stops growth helps the aging processes.

Whatever thought dominates the mind at any time is constantly modifying, changing the life ideal, so that every suggestion that comes into the mind from any source is registered in the cell life, etched in the character, and outpictured in the expression and appearance. If the ideal of continual youth, of a body in a state of perpetual rejuvenation, dominates the mind, it neutralizes the aging processes. All of the body follows the dominating thought, motive and feeling, and takes on its expression. For example, a man who is constantly worrying, fretting, a victim of fear, cannot possibly help outpicturing this condition in his body. Nothing in the world can counteract this hardening, aging, ossifying process but a complete reversal of the thought, so that the opposite ideas dominate. The effect of the mind on the body is always absolutely scientific. It follows an inexorable law.

There is a power of health latent in every cell of the body which would always keep the cell in harmony and preserve its integrity if the thought were right. This latent power of health in the cell can be so developed by right thinking and living as to retard very materially the aging processes.

One of the most effective means of developing it is to keep cheerful and optimistic. As long as the mind faces the sun of life it will cast no shadow before it.

Hold ever before you, like a beacon light, the youth ideal—strength, buoyancy, hopefulness, expectancy. Hold persistently to the thought that your body is the last two years’ product; that there may not be in it a single cell more than a year and a half old; that it is constantly young because it is perpetually being renewed and that, therefore, it ought to look fresh and youthful.

Constantly say to yourself: “If Nature makes me a new body every few months, comparatively, if the billions of tissue cells are being perpetually renewed, if the oldest of these cells are, perhaps, rarely, if ever, more than two years old, why should they appear to be sixty or seventy-five?” A two-year-old cell could not look like a seventy-year-old cell of its own accord, but we know from experience that the old-age conviction can make these youthful cells look very old. If the body is always young, it should always look young; and it would if we did not make it look old by stamping old age upon it. We Americans seem very adept in putting the old-age stamp upon new tissue cells. Yet it is just as easy to form the youthful-thought habit as the old-age-thought habit.

If you would keep young, you must learn the secret of self-rejuvenation, self-refreshment, self-renewal, in your thought, in your work. Hard thoughts, too serious thoughts, mental confusion, excitement, worry, anxiety, jealousy, the indulgence of explosive passions, all tend to shorten life.

You will find a wonderful rejuvenating power in the cultivation of faith in the immortal Principle of health in every atom of your being. We are all conscious that there is something in us which is never sick and which never dies, something which connects us with the Divine. There is a wonderful healing influence in holding the consciousness of this great truth.

Some people are so constituted that they perpetually renew themselves. They do not seem to get tired or weary of their tasks, because their minds are constantly refreshing themselves. They are self-lubricators, self-renewers. To keep from aging, we must keep the picture of youth in all its beauty and glory impressed upon the mind. It is impossible to appear youthful, to be young, unless we feel young.

Without realizing it, most people are using the old-age thought as a chisel to cut a little deeper the wrinkles. Their old-age thought is stamping itself upon the new cells only a few months old, so that they very soon look to be forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years old.

Never allow yourself to think of yourself as growing old. Constantly affirm, if you feel yourself aging, “I am young because I am perpetually being renewed; my life comes new every moment from the Infinite Source of life. I am new every morning and fresh every evening because I live, move, and have my being in Him who is the Source of all life.” Not only affirm this mentally, but verbally when you can. Make this picture of perpetual renewal, constant refreshment, recreation, so vivid, that you will feel the thrill of youthful renewal through your entire system. Under no circumstances allow the old-age thought and suggestion to remain in the mind. Remember that it is what you feel, what you are convinced of, that will be outpictured in your body. If you think you are aging, if you walk, talk, dress, and act like an old person, these conditions will be outpictured in your expression, face, manner, and body generally.

Youthful thought should be a life habit.

Cling to the thought that the truth of your being can never age, because it is Divine Principle. Picture the cells of the body being constantly made over. Hold this perpetual-renewal picture in your mind, and the old-age thought, the old-age conviction will become inoperative.

The new youth-thought habit will drive out the old-age-thought habit. If you can only feel your whole body being perpetually made over, constantly renewed, you will keep the body young, fresh.

There is a tremendous youth-retaining power in holding high ideals and lofty sentiments. The spirit cannot grow old while one is constantly aspiring to something better, higher, nobler. Employment which develops the higher self; the frequent dwelling upon lofty themes and high purposes—all are powerful preservatives of youth. It is senility of the soul that makes people old.

The living of life should be a perpetual joy. Youth and joy are synonymous. If we do not enjoy life, if we do not feel that it is a delight to be alive, if we do not look upon our work as a grand privilege, we shall age prematurely.

Live always in a happy mental attitude. Live in the ideal, and the aging processes cannot get hold of you. It is the ideal that keeps one young. When we think of age, we think of weakness, decrepitude, imperfection; we do not think of wholeness, vigor. Every time you think of yourself make a vivid mental picture of your ideal self as the very picture of youth, of health and vigor. Think health. Feel the spirit of youth and hope surging through your body. Form the most perfect picture of physical manhood or womanhood that is possible to the human mind.

The elixir of youth which alchemists sought so long in chemicals, we find lies in ourselves. The secret is in our own mentality. Perpetual rejuvenation is possible only by right thinking. We look as old as we think and feel because it is thought and feeling that change our appearance.

Let us put beauty into our lives by thinking beautiful thoughts, building beautiful ideals, and picturing beautiful things in our imagination.

I know of no remedy for old-age conditions so powerful as love—love for our work, love for our fellow-men, love for everything.

It is the most powerful life-renewer, refreshener, re-creator, known. Love awakens the noblest sentiments, the finest sensibilities, the most exquisite qualities in man.

Try to find and live in the soul of things, to see the best in everybody. When you think of a person, hold in your mind the ideal of that person—that which God meant him to be—not the deformed, weak, ignorant creature which vice and wrong living may have made. This habit of refusing to see anything but the ideal will not only be a wonderful help to others, but also to yourself. Refuse to see deformity or weakness anywhere, but hold persistently your highest ideals. Other things being equal, it is the cleanest, purest mind that lives longest.

Harmony, peace, and serenity are absolutely necessary to perpetuate youthful conditions. All discord, all unbalanced mental operations, tend to produce aging conditions. The contemplation of the eternal verities enriches the ideals and freshens life because it destroys fear, uncertainty, and worry by adding assurance and certainty to life.

Old-age conditions can only exist in cells which have become deteriorated and hardened by wrong thinking and vicious living. Unrestrained passion or fits of temper burn out the cells very rapidly.

People who are very useful, who are doing their work grandly, growing vigorously, retain their youthful appearance. We can form the habit of staying young just as well as the habit of growing old.

Increasing power and wisdom ought to be the only sign of our long continuance on this earth. We ought to do our best work after fifty, or even after sixty or seventy; and if the brain is kept active, fresh, and young, and the brain cells are not ruined by too serious a life, by worry, fear, selfishness, or disease, the mind will constantly increase in vigor and power.

If we are convinced that the life processes can perpetuate youth instead of age, they will obey the command. The fact that man’s sin, his ignorance of true living, made the threescore years, with the possible addition of ten more, the average limit of life centuries ago, is no reason why any one in this man-emancipating age should narrow himself to this limit.

An all-wise and benevolent Creator could not make us with such a great yearning for long life, a longing to remain young, without any possibility of realizing it. The very fact of this universal protest in all human beings against the enormous disproportion between the magnitude of our mission upon earth and the shortness of the time and the meagreness of the opportunities for carrying it out; the universal yearning for longevity; and all analogy in the animal kingdom, all point to the fact that man was not only intended for a much longer life, but also for a much greater freedom from the present old-age weaknesses and handicaps.

There is not the slightest indication in the marvellous mechanism of man that he was intended to become weak, crippled, and useless after a comparatively few years. Instead, all the indications are toward progress into a larger, completer, fuller manhood, greater power. A dwarfed, weak, useless man was never in the Creator’s plan. Retrogression is contrary to all principle and law. Progress, perpetual enlargement, growth, are the truth of man. The Creator never made anything for retrogression; it is contrary to the very nature of Deity. “Onward and upward” is written upon every atom in the universe. Imagine the Creator fashioning a man in his own likeness for only a few years of activity and growth, and then—retrogression, crippled helplessness! There is nothing of God in this picture. Whatever the Deity makes bears the stamp of perpetual progress, everlasting growth. There is no going backward in his plans, everything moves forward to one eternal divine purpose. A decrepit, helpless old man or woman is a burlesque of the human being God made. His image does not deteriorate or go backward, but moves forever onward, eternally upward. If human beings could only once grasp this idea, that the reality of them is divine, and that divinity does not go backward or grow old, they would lose all sense of fear and worry, all enemies of their progress and happiness would slink away, and the aging processes would cease.

The coming man will not grow old in appearance as he now does. The tendency of the race will be more and more toward perpetual youth.

The time will come when people will look upon old age as an unreality, a negative, a mere phantom of the real man. The rose that fades is not the real rose. The real rose is the ideal—the idea which pushes out a new one every time we pluck the one that fades.

The real man is God’s ideal, and in the light of the new day that is dawning man will glimpse that perfect ideal. He will know the truth, and the truth will make him free. In that new day he will cast from him the hampering, age-worn vestures woven in the thought-loom of mankind through the centuries, and stand erect—the perfect being, the ideal man.

X. THE MIRACLE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE

HY,” asked Mirabeau, “should we call ourselves men, unless it be to succeed in everything everywhere?” Nothing else will so nerve you to accomplish great things as to believe in your own greatness, in your own marvellous possibilities. Count that man an enemy who shakes your faith in yourself, in your ability to do the thing you have set your heart upon doing, for when your confidence is gone, your power is gone. Your achievement will never rise higher than your self-faith. It would be as reasonable for Napoleon to have expected to get his army over the Alps by sitting down and declaring that the undertaking was too great for him, as for you to hope to achieve anything significant in life while harboring grave doubts and fears as to your ability.

The miracles of civilization have been performed by men and women of great self-confidence, who had unwavering faith in their power to accomplish the tasks they undertook. The race would have been centuries behind what it is to-day had it not been for their grit, their determination, their persistence in finding and making real the thing they believed in and which the world often denounced as chimerical or impossible.

There is no law by which you can achieve success in anything without expecting it, demanding it, assuming it. There must be a strong, firm self-faith first, or the thing will never come. There is no room for chance in God’s world of system and supreme order. Everything must have not only a cause, but a sufficient cause—a cause as large as the result. A stream cannot rise higher than its source. A great success must have a great source in expectation, in self-confidence, and in persistent endeavor to attain it. No matter how great the ability, how large the genius, or how splendid the education, the achievement will never rise higher than the confidence. He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

It does not matter what other people think of you, of your plans, or of your aims. No matter if they call you a visionary, a crank, or a dreamer; you must believe in yourself. You forsake yourself when you lose your confidence. Never allow anybody or any misfortune to shake your belief in yourself. You may lose your property, your health, your reputation, other peoples’ confidence, even; but there is always hope for you so long as you keep a firm faith in yourself. If you never lose that, but keep pushing on, the world will, sooner or later, make way for you.

A soldier once took a message to Napoleon in such great haste that the horse he rode dropped dead before he delivered the paper. Napoleon dictated his answer and, handing it to the messenger, ordered him to mount his own horse and deliver it with all possible speed.

The messenger looked at the magnificent animal, with its superb trappings, and said, “Nay, General, but this is too gorgeous, too magnificent for a common soldier.”

Napoleon said, “Nothing is too good or too magnificent for a French soldier.”

The world is full of people like this poor French soldier, who think that what others have is too good for them; that it does not fit their humble condition; that they are not expected to have as good things as those who are “more favored.” They do not realize how they weaken themselves by this mental attitude of self-depreciation or self-effacement. They do not claim enough, expect enough, or demand enough of themselves.

You will never become a giant if you only make a pygmy’s claim for yourself; if you only expect a pygmy’s part. There is no law which can cause a pygmy’s thinking to produce a giant. The statue follows the model. The model is the inward vision.

Most people have been educated to think that it was not intended they should have the best there is in the world; that the good and the beautiful things of life were not designed for them, but were reserved for those especially favored by fortune. They have grown up under this conviction of their inferiority, and of course they will be inferior until they claim superiority as their birthright. A vast number of men and women who are really capable of doing great things, do small things, live mediocre lives, because they do not expect or demand enough of themselves. They do not know how to call out their best.

One reason why the human race as a whole has not measured up to its possibilities, to its promise; one reason why we see everywhere splendid ability doing the work of mediocrity; is because people do not think half enough of themselves. We do not realize our divinity; that we are a part of the great causation principle of the universe.

We do not think highly enough of our superb birthright, nor comprehend to what heights of sublimity we were intended and expected to rise, nor to what extent we can really be masters of ourselves. We fail to see that we can control our own destiny; make ourselves do whatever is possible; make ourselves become whatever we long to be.

“If we choose to be no more than clods of clay,” says Marie Corelli, “then we shall be used as clods of clay for braver feet to tread on.”

The persistent thought that you are not as good as others, that you are a weak, ineffective being, will lower your whole standard of life and paralyze your ability.

A man who is self-reliant, positive, optimistic, and undertakes his work with the assurance of success, magnetizes conditions. He draws to himself the literal fulfillment of the promise, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.”

There is everything in assuming the part we wish to play, and playing it royally. If you are ambitious to do big things, you must make a large programme for yourself, and assume the part it demands.

There is something in the atmosphere of the man who has a large and true estimate of himself, who believes that he is going to win out; something in his very appearance that wins half the battle before a blow is struck. Things get out of the way of the vigorous, affirmative man, which are always tripping the self-depreciating, negative man.

We often hear it said of a man, “Everything he undertakes succeeds,” or “Everything he touches turns to gold.” By the force of his character and the creative power of his thought, such a man wrings success from the most adverse circumstances. Confidence begets confidence. A man who carries in his very presence an air of victory, radiates assurance, and imparts to others confidence that he can do the thing he attempts. As time goes on, he is reënforced not only by the power of his own thought, but also by that of all who know him. His friends and acquaintances affirm and reaffirm his ability to succeed, and make each successive triumph easier of achievement than its predecessor. His self-poise, assurance, confidence and ability increase in a direct ratio to the number of his achievements. As the savage Indian thought that the power of every enemy he conquered entered into himself, so in reality does every conquest in war, in peaceful industry, in commerce, in invention, in science, or in art add to the conqueror’s power to do the next thing.

Set the mind toward the thing you would accomplish so resolutely, so definitely, and with such vigorous determination, and put so much grit into your resolution, that nothing on earth can turn you from your purpose until you attain it.

This very assertion of superiority, the assumption of power, the affirmation of belief in yourself, the mental attitude that claims success as an inalienable birthright, will strengthen the whole man and give power to a combination of faculties which doubt, fear, and a lack of confidence undermine.

Confidence is the Napoleon of the mental army. It doubles and trebles the power of all the other faculties. The whole mental army waits until confidence leads the way.

Even a race horse cannot win the prize after it has once lost confidence in itself. Courage, born of self-confidence, is the prod which brings out the last ounce of reserve force.

The reason why so many men fail is because they do not commit themselves with a determination to win at any cost. They do not have that superb confidence in themselves which never looks back; which burns all bridges behind it. There is just uncertainty enough as to whether they will succeed to take the edge off their effort, and it is just this little difference between doing pretty well and flinging all oneself, all his power, into his career, that makes the difference between mediocrity and a grand achievement.

If you doubt your ability to do what you set out to do; if you think that others are better fitted to do it than you; if you fear to let yourself out and take chances; if you lack boldness; if you have a timid, shrinking nature; if the negatives preponderate in your vocabulary; if you think that you lack positiveness, initiative, aggressiveness, ability; you can never win anything very great until you change your whole mental attitude and learn to have great faith in yourself. Fear, doubt, and timidity must be turned out of your mind.

Your own mental picture of yourself is a good measure of yourself and your possibilities. If there is no out-reach to your mind, no spirit of daring, no firm self-faith, you will never accomplish much.

A man’s confidence measures the height of his possibilities. A stream cannot rise higher than its fountain head.

Power is largely a question of strong, vigorous, perpetual thinking along the line of the ambition, parallel with the aim—the great life purpose. Here is where power originates.

The deed must first live in the thought or it will never be a reality; and a strong, vigorous concept of the thing we want to do is a tremendous initial step. A thought that is timidly born will be timidly executed. There must be vigor of conception or an indifferent execution.

All the greatest achievements in the world began in longing—in dreamings and hopings which for a time were nursed in despair, with no light in sight. This longing kept the courage up and made self-sacrifice easier until the thing dreamed of—the mental vision—was realized.

“According to your faith be it unto you.” Our faith is a very good measure of what we get out of life. The man of weak faith gets little; the man of mighty faith gets much.

The very intensity of your confidence in your ability to do the thing you attempt, is definitely related to the degree of your achievement.

If we were to analyze the marvellous successes of many of our self-made men, we should find that when they first started out in active life they held the confident, vigorous, persistent thought of and belief in their ability to accomplish what they had undertaken. Their mental attitude was set so stubbornly toward their goal that the doubts and fears which dog and hinder and frighten the man who holds a low estimate of himself, who asks, demands, and expects but little, of or for himself, got out of their path, and the world made way for them.

We are very apt to think of men who have been unusually successful in any line as greatly favored by fortune; and we try to account for it in all sorts of ways but the right one. The fact is that their success represents their expectations of themselves—the sum of their creative, positive, habitual thinking. It is their mental attitude outpictured and made tangible in their environment. They have wrought—created—what they have and what they are out of their constructive thought and their unquenchable faith in themselves.

We must not only believe we can succeed, but we must believe it with all our hearts.

We must have a positive conviction that we can attain success.

No lukewarm energy or indifferent ambition ever accomplished anything. There must be vigor in our expectation, in our faith, in our determination, in our endeavor. We must resolve with the energy that does things.

Not only must the desire for the thing we long for be kept uppermost, but there must be strongly concentrated intensity of effort to attain our object.

As it is the fierceness of the heat that melts the iron ore and makes it possible to weld it or mold it into shape; as it is the intensity of the electrical force that dissolves the diamond—the hardest known substance; so it is the concentrated aim, the invincible purpose, that wins success. Nothing was ever accomplished by a half-hearted desire.

Many people make a very poor showing in life, because there is no vim, no vigor in their efforts. Their resolutions are spineless; there is no backbone in their endeavor—no grit in their ambition.

One must have that determination which never looks back and which knows no defeat; that resolution which burns all bridges behind it and is willing to risk everything upon the effort. When a man ceases to believe in himself—gives up the fight—you cannot do much for him except to try to restore what he has lost—his self-faith—and to get out of his head the idea that there is a fate which tosses him hither and thither, a mysterious destiny which decides things whether he will or not. You cannot do much with him until he comprehends that he is bigger than any fate; that he has within himself a power mightier than any force outside of him.

One reason why the careers of most of us are so pinched and narrow, is because we do not have a large faith in ourselves and in our power to accomplish. We are held back by too much caution. We are timid about venturing. We are not bold enough.

Whatever we long for, yearn for, struggle for, and hold persistently in the mind, we tend to become just in exact proportion to the intensity and persistence of the thought. We think ourselves into smallness, into inferiority by thinking downward. We ought to think upward, then we would reach the heights where superiority dwells. The man whose mind is set firmly toward achievement does not appropriate success, he is success.

Self-confidence is not egotism. It is knowledge, and it comes from the consciousness of possessing the ability requisite for what one undertakes. Civilization to-day rests upon self-confidence.

A firm self-faith helps a man to project himself with a force that is almost irresistible. A balancer, a doubter, has no projectile power. If he starts at all, he moves with uncertainty. There is no vigor in his initiative, no positiveness in his energy.

There is a great difference between a man who thinks that “perhaps” he can do, or who “will try” to do a thing, and a man who “knows” he can do it, who is “bound” to do it; who feels within himself a pulsating power, an irresistible force, equal to any emergency.

This difference between uncertainty and certainty, between vacillation and decision, between the man who wavers and the man who decides things, between “I hope to” and “I can,” between “I’ll try” and “I will”—this little difference measures the distance between weakness and power, between mediocrity and excellence, between commonness and superiority.

The man who does things must be able to project himself with a mighty force, to fling the whole weight of his being into his work, ever gathering momentum against the obstacles which confront him; every issue must be met wholly, unhesitatingly. He cannot do this with a wavering, doubting, unstable mind.

The fact that a man believes implicitly that he can do what may seem impossible or very difficult to others, shows that there is something within him that makes him equal to the work he has undertaken.

Faith unites man with the Infinite, and no one can accomplish great things in life unless he works in oneness with the Infinite. When a man lives so near to the Supreme that the divine Presence is felt all the time, then he is in a position to express power.

There is nothing which will multiply one’s ability like self-faith. It can make a one-talent man a success, while a ten-talent man without it would fail.

Faith walks on the mountain tops, hence its superior vision. It sees what is invisible to those who follow.

It was the sustaining power of a mighty self-faith that enabled Columbus to bear the jeers and imputations of the Spanish cabinet; that sustained him when his sailors were in mutiny and he was at their mercy in a little vessel on an unknown sea; that enabled him to hold steadily to his purpose, entering in his diary day after day—“This day we sailed west, which was our course.”

It was this self-faith which gave courage and determination to Fulton to attempt his first trip up the Hudson in the Clermont, before thousands of his fellow citizens, who had gathered to howl and jeer at his expected failure. He believed he could do the thing he attempted though the whole world was against him.

What miracles self-confidence has wrought! What impossible deeds it has helped to perform! It took Dewey past cannons, torpedoes, and mines to victory at Manila Bay; it carried Farragut, lashed to the rigging, past the defenses of the enemy in Mobile Bay; it led Nelson and Grant to victory; it has been the great tonic in the world of invention, discovery, and art; it has won a thousand triumphs in war and science which were deemed impossible by doubters and the faint-hearted.

Self-faith has been the miracle-worker of the ages. It has enabled the inventor and the discoverer to go on and on amidst troubles and trials which otherwise would have utterly disheartened them. It has held innumerable heroes to their tasks until the glorious deeds were accomplished.

The only inferiority in us is what we put into ourselves. If only we better understood our divinity we should all have this larger faith which is the distinction of the brave soul. We think ourselves into smallness. Were we to think upward we should reach the heights where superiority dwells.

Perhaps there is no other one thing which keeps so many people back as their low estimate of themselves. They are more handicapped by their limiting thought, by their foolish convictions of inefficiency, than by almost anything else, for there is no power in the universe that can help a man do a thing when he thinks he cannot do it. Self-faith must lead the way. You cannot go beyond the limits you set for yourself.

It is one of the most difficult things to a mortal to really believe in his own bigness, in his own grandeur; to believe that his yearnings and hungerings and aspirations for higher, nobler things have any basis in reality or any real, ultimate end. But they are, in fact, the signs of ability to match them, of power to make them real. They are the stirrings of the divinity within us; the call to something better, to go higher.

No man gets very far in the world or expresses great power until self-faith is born in him; until he catches a glimpse of his higher, nobler self; until he realizes that his ambition, his aspiration, are proofs of his ability to reach the ideal which haunts him. The Creator would not have mocked us with the yearning for infinite achievement without giving us the ability and the opportunity for realizing it, any more than he would have mocked the wild birds with an instinct to fly south in the winter without giving them a sunny South to match the instinct.

The cause of whatever comes to you in life is within you. There is where it is created. The thing you long for and work for comes to you because your thought has created it; because there is something inside you that attracts it. It comes because there is an affinity within you for it. Your own comes to you; is always seeking you.

Whenever you see a person who has been unusually successful in any field, remember that he has usually thought himself into his position; his mental attitude and energy have created it; what he stands for in his community has come from his attitude toward life, toward his fellow men, toward his vocation, toward himself. Above all else, it is the outcome of his self-faith, of his inward vision of himself; the result of his estimate of his powers and possibilities.

The men who have done the great things in the world have been profound believers in themselves.

If I could give the young people of America but one word of advice, it would be this—“Believe in yourself with all your might.” That is, believe that your destiny is inside of you, that there is a power within you which, if awakened, aroused, developed, and matched with honest effort, will not only make a noble man or woman of you, but will also make you successful and happy.

All through the Bible we find emphasized the miracle-working power of faith. Faith in himself indicates that a man has a glimpse of forces within him which either annihilate the obstacles in the way, or make them seem insignificant in comparison with his ability to overcome them.

Faith opens the door that enables us to look into the soul’s limitless possibilities and reveals such powers there, such unconquerable forces, that we are not only encouraged to go on, but feel a great consciousness of added power because we have touched omnipotence, have a glimpse of the great source of things.

Faith is that something within us which does not guess, but knows. It knows because it sees what our coarser selves, our animal natures cannot see. It is the prophet within us, the divine messenger appointed to accompany man through life to guide and direct and encourage him. It gives him a glimpse of his possibilities to keep him from losing heart, from quitting his upward life struggle.

Our faith knows because it sees what we cannot see. It sees resources, powers, potencies which our doubts and fears veil from us. Faith is assured, is never afraid, because it sees the way out; sees the solution of its problem. It has dipped in the realms of our finer life, our higher and diviner kingdom. All things are possible to him who has faith, because faith sees, recognizes the power that means accomplishment.

If we had faith in God and in ourselves we could remove all mountains of difficulty, and our lives would be one triumphal march to the goal of our ambition.

If we had faith enough we could cure all our ills and accomplish the maximum of our possibilities.

Faith never fails; it is a miracle worker. It looks beyond all boundaries, transcends all limitations, penetrates all obstacles and sees the goal.

It is doubt and fear, timidity and cowardice, that hold us down and keep us in mediocrity—doing petty things when we are capable of sublime deeds.

If we had faith enough we should travel Godward infinitely faster than we do.

The time will come when every human being will have unbounded faith and will live the life triumphant. Then there will be no poverty in the world, no failures, and the discords of life will all vanish.

XI. AFFIRMATION AND AUDIBLE
SUGGESTION.

 HAVE promised my God that I will do it.”

Who can estimate the tremendous, buttressing power which reënforced Lincoln when on the 22d of September, 1862, he resolved upon the Emancipation Proclamation, and entered this solemn vow in his diary: “I have promised my God that I will do it.”

Up to this time doubt, uncertainty, his natural precaution, had influenced him and kept him from coming to a decision; but now he solemnly resolved to burn all bridges behind him and henceforth to dedicate himself to the accomplishment of this great purpose.

After the false report that Dreyfus had escaped from Devil’s Island, his guards were doubled, and he was chained to a plank every night with heavy irons, until his legs were so chafed that they became bloody and gangrenous. The wretched prisoner thought his jailers had orders to torture him to death, but he doggedly and persistently repeated to himself: “I will live! I will live!” Who can doubt that—conscious as he was of his innocence—this vehement affirmation, in conjunction with the man’s almost superhuman will-power, had much to do with his survival of the revolting cruelty to which he was subjected in his island prison.

Few people realize the force that exists in a vigorous, perpetual affirmation of the thing we long to be or are determined to accomplish. Great things are done under the stress of an overmastering conviction of one’s ability to do what he undertakes; under the tremendous power of the affirmative, expressed with unflinching determination. The very intensity of your affirmation of confidence in your ability to do what you attempt is definitely related to the degree of your achievement. We need great projectile power. It is easier to force a huge shell through the steel plates of a ship when projected with lightning speed from the cannon than to push it through slowly.

People who always say “God willing,” or “If Providence so wills,” they will do this or that, little realize how the doubt expressed by the “if” takes the edge from their positiveness, and tends to produce negative minds. If the Creator has given a man the inclination and the power to do a thing that is right and good He is always willing that he should do it.

Yet I know a man—and there are thousands like him—who says that he never makes a positive statement of what he is going to do, because it would be questioning the will of God—a reflection upon the Deity.

There is no one thing which will give a timid soul such assurance, which will so brace up one who is inclined to depreciate and efface himself, as the constant affirmation of the “I am.” “I am courage; I am health, vigor, strength; I am power; I am peace; I am plenty; I am a part of abundance, because I am one with the very Source of Infinite Supply. I am rich, because I am heir to all the resources of the universe.”

Stoutly, constantly, everlastingly affirm that you will become what your ambitions indicate as fitting and possible. Do not say “I shall be a success sometime”; say, “I am a success. Success is my birthright.” Do not say that you are going to be happy in the future. Say to yourself, “I was intended for happiness, made for it, and I am happy.”

The habit of claiming as our own, as a vivid reality that which we desire, has a tremendous magnetic power. The constant vigorous assertion of “I am health; I am vigor; I am power; I am principle; I am truth; I am justice; I am beauty; because made in the image of perfection, of harmony, of truth, of justice, of immortal beauty”—tends to the manifestation of these things in our lives.

“I am that which I think I am—and I can be nothing else.” The man immersed in material things and who lives only to make money, believes he can make it; knows that he can make it. He does not say to himself every morning, “Well, I do not know whether I can make anything to-day. I will try. I may succeed and I may not.” He simply and positively asserts that he can do what he desires and then starts out to put into operation plans and forces which will bring it about.

If you affirm “I am health; I am prosperity; I am this or that,” but do not believe it, you will not be helped by affirmation. You must believe what you affirm.

Few people realize the tremendous creative power there is in stout self-assertion; in the vigorous affirmation of the ego, the “I,” the “I am.” But those who have once properly put it in practice never again doubt its efficacy.

A prominent music master in New York who trains opera singers advised a girl with great musical ability, but with deficient self-confidence and self-assertion, to stand before a mirror every day and, assuming a magnificent pose, say to herself, “I, I, I,” with all the emphasis and power she could muster. He told her to assert herself and to think of herself as a prima donna of great power; that by constantly assuming the part, playing the rôle, she would acquire the habit of self-confidence, which would be worth everything to her. “Imagine that you are Nordica or Patti,” he said. “Assume that part boldly and fearlessly—and hold yourself with a dignity and power corresponding with the character.” This advice, which she followed literally, was worth more to this timid girl than scores of music lessons. The practice in it increased her confidence in herself wonderfully, and she was soon cured of her shyness and timidity.

Audible self-suggestion, which is merely a continuation or extension of the affirmation principle, is one of the greatest aids to self-development. This form of suggestion—talking to oneself vigorously, earnestly—seems to arouse the sleeping forces in the subconscious self even more effectually than thinking the same thing. We all know how we are strengthened by the vigorous affirmation of our determination to do this or to do that. We know the virtue in a robust determination backed by the vigorously spoken resolve. These are but other forms of arousing in our subconscious selves latent powers which, when understood and developed, will do wonders for us.

There is a force in words spoken aloud which is not stirred by going over the same words mentally. They sometimes arouse slumbering energies within us which thinking does not stir up—especially if we have not been trained to think deeply; to focus the mind closely. They make a more lasting impression upon the mind—just as words which pass through the eye from the printed page make a greater impression on the brain than we get by thinking the same words; as seeing objects of nature makes a more lasting impression upon the mind than thinking about them. A vividness, a certain force, accompanies the spoken word—especially if earnestly, vehemently uttered—which is not apparent to many in merely thinking about what words express. If you repeat to yourself aloud, vigorously, even vehemently, a firm resolve, you are more likely to carry it to reality than if you merely resolve in silence.

We become so accustomed to our silent thoughts that the voicing of them, the giving audible expression to our yearnings, makes a much deeper impression upon us.

The audible self-encouragement treatment may be used with marvellous results in correcting our weaknesses; overcoming our deficiencies.

A remarkably successful friend of mine says that he has been wonderfully helped by talking to himself about his faults and shortcomings. “Heart-to-heart talks” with himself he calls these little exhortations.

If he thinks his ambition is lagging, he gives himself a mental exercise which tends to sharpen and improve it. If he thinks his standards are lowering, he braces up his ideal by perpetually affirming his ability to do better and to climb higher every day.

He says that he starts out every morning with the determination that he is going to be a bigger man at night than he was in the morning; that he is going to stand for more; that he is going to carry more weight in his community. He talks to himself about his failures of the day before and about his programme for the day, while he is dressing in the morning, something after this fashion:

“Now, John, you lost your temper yesterday; you went all to pieces over a mistake that some one made in the office; you made a fool of yourself, so that your employees thought less of you than before, and it totally unfitted your mind for doing the large things that were clamoring for your attention. Don’t make that mistake to-day. You are a pretty small man if you cannot rise above the petty details which confuse and block shallow minds. If you cannot rise above the trivial details of your office you are not a leader.”

One of his great weaknesses was that of indecision. He had a perfect horror of settling an important thing so that it could not be reopened for consideration. He would always leave things until the last minute—his letters unsealed, papers unsigned, contracts open, until he was actually forced to close them, for fear he might want to reconsider his decisions.

He tells me that he finally overcame this weakness by constantly telling himself how foolish it was; how this vacillating habit would handicap his whole career, and how all men of executive ability—men who do great things—are characterized by their quick, strong decisions.

It does not matter what the fault is—whether it is the habit of dawdling, of being late in keeping appointments, of losing his temper, of being fractious and unreasonable with his employees—whatever it may be, he talks himself out of it. In his talks, he calls himself by name, and carries a picture of his other, better, diviner self in his mind; persistently holding before himself the image of the man he wants to be, longs to be, and constantly affirms his ability to be. He says that nothing else has done half as much for him as this habit of talking things over with himself.

Another young man in New York recently told me that he tries to walk through Central Park every morning on his way to business in order to get a chance to talk to himself alone. During these talks, he tells himself that, let what will come during the day, he must not lose his self-control; he must be a gentleman under all circumstances; that he must not allow worry, anxiety, or unfortunate moods to waste his energy, but must work it all up into effectiveness.

He says that this self “jacking-up”—as he calls it—this self-tuning in the morning, not only helps him to get a larger efficiency into his day’s work, but also to do the work with much less wear and tear. It is a tremendous tonic. It stimulates him to better and better work. Since he has adopted the self-communing, self-bracing habit, he has gone ahead by leaps and bounds.

Every man would be helped as these young men have been by the habit of talking to himself just as though he were another person in whom he was very much interested and to whom he was giving his best advice.

Whenever you can do so, it is a good plan to get so far away from others that you will not be conscious of their presence, and then go through your resolutions verbally—with vehemence, if necessary. You will soon be surprised to find how much better they will stick in your consciousness, and how much more likely you are to follow your own advice when you give it orally.

If you have some vicious habit which is keeping you back, sapping the life out of you, you will be greatly strengthened in your power to overcome it by constantly saying to yourself, “I know this thing (calling it by name) is destroying my vitality. I am not so vigorous; so robust physically and mentally; I am not so efficient as I should be; I do not think so clearly, I cannot control my mind so well as I could were I not hampered by this weakness.

“The paralyzing habit is placing me at a great disadvantage in life; it is holding me up to ridicule, to unfavorable comparison with others. I know that I have more ability than many of those about me who are accomplishing a great deal more. Now, I am going to conquer this thing which is destroying my prospects. I am going to get freedom for myself at any cost.”

If your sin is immorality say to yourself: “Nothing will blacken my soul quicker than this. I am ruining my chances of future happiness. This cursed thing is an insult to my ideal of womanhood, an insult to my future wife, a crime to my future children. There is no other thing which will so deteriorate my manhood, which will so honeycomb my very character and destroy my self-respect as this damnable thing. I hereby take a sacred oath never to repeat that which will lessen my chances in life, that which will make me think less of myself. I despise the thing which will keep me back in life, which will tend to make me a failure and anything less than a man. I will not take the risk of indulging a little longer with the hope that something may help me break the habit, or that something will assist me to get strength later, because I know that every indulgence in the vicious habit binds me more strongly to it, and makes my chance of breaking away so much less.”

Just talk to yourself in this way whenever alone and you will be surprised to see how quickly the audible suggestion will weaken the grip of the vicious habit. In a short time your self-talks will so strengthen your will power that you will be able to entirely eradicate your weakness.

But you must be very positive in the affirmation of your ability to overcome it. If you simply say to yourself, “I know that this thing is bad for me; I know that if I continue to drink, or to smoke cigarettes, or to practice immorality, it will interfere with my success, but I do not believe I shall ever be able to overcome it; it has gotten such a hold on me that I cannot give it up”—you will never make any headway.

Always stoutly affirm your ability to conquer. Say to yourself, “I was not made to be dominated by a vice, a weed, or an extract of grain. God’s image in me was not intended to wallow in filth. I can never use the ability I have to the best advantage, never be the man I was intended to be or am capable of being, while I harbor this enemy which will sap my ability and weaken my chances in life. It is creating structural changes in my body; it is destroying my ability and blunting my moral sensibility. I am done with it once and forever; the appetite for it is destroyed in my being. I do not want it—I do not need it—I will not touch it. I was made to hold up my head and be a man—to do the work of a man. There is something divine within me—the God-man—perfectly able to overcome this thing which is crippling my career and holding me back, and I am going to do it.”

Don’t be disappointed if you do not get immediate relief. Continue to talk to yourself in this confident manner, especially upon retiring, always affirming your ability to overcome your weakness, whatever it may be, and you will conquer. Your will power will assist you, but conviction is a thousand times stronger than will power; and the constant affirmation of the ability of the divinity within you to overcome the thing which handicaps you will finally help you to conquer. When you once get a glimpse of the divine power within you, and experience its help; when you learn to trust to the God in you for assistance, you will find yourself and the Divinity always in the majority. No power can stand against you then.

At first it may seem silly to you to be talking to yourself, but you will derive so much benefit from it that you will have recourse to it in remedying all your defects. There is no fault, however great or small, which will not succumb to persistent audible suggestion. For example, you may be naturally timid and shrink from meeting people; and you may distrust your own ability. If so, you will be greatly helped by assuring yourself in your daily self-talks that you are not timid; that, on the contrary, you are the embodiment of courage and bravery. Assure yourself that there is no reason why you should be timid, because there is nothing inferior or peculiar about you; that you are attractive, and that you know how to act in the presence of others. Say to yourself that you are never again going to allow yourself to harbor any thoughts of self-depreciation or timidity or inferiority; that you are going to hold your head up and go about as though you were a king, a conqueror, instead of crawling about like a whipped cur. You are going to assert your manhood, your individuality.

Man was planned to stand erect, to look up, to go through life with his backbone straight, to look the world in the face with a fearless eye—he was never made to cower and flinch, to whine, to apologize and to depreciate his ability.

If you lack initiative, stoutly affirm your ability to begin things, and to push them through to a finish. And always put your resolve into action at the first opportunity.

If you are bashful, diffident in company, and inclined to depreciate yourself and think that you are not quite as good as other people, just deny all of this to yourself, and resolve that you will never lose an opportunity for cultivating and strengthening your deficient conversational faculties.

Never allow yourself to imagine that you are being watched or laughed at. Always think of yourself as a king or a queen. If you suffer from self-consciousness, oversensitiveness, say to yourself constantly: “I am a king. There is no reason why I should consider myself inferior to others. I will just walk about as though I were governor of my state, or mayor of my city; a full, complete man—master of the situation.”

If you are the victim of indecision; if you are inclined to weigh and balance and reconsider things all the time, just deny all this to yourself verbally, strongly, emphatically, and resolve that hereafter you are going to act before your doubt has a chance to weaken your decision or ask for a reconsideration. Say to yourself that you would better make mistakes than not to act at all, or to be forever on the fence.

If you have hard work to make up your mind to undertake what you know you ought to, just get by yourself somewhere alone and brace yourself up. Talk to yourself as you would to some friend whom you love; some one whom you know has ability but lacks courage and pluck. Reënforce yourself; reinvigorate your mind; reassure yourself.

Through these self-talks, if you will be sincere with yourself and strong and persistent in your affirmations, you will be surprised to see how you can increase your courage, your confidence, and your ability to execute your ideas.

I know a young man who was so self-conscious when a youth that he would cross the street to avoid meeting any one he knew. He was completely confused when any one he was not accustomed to see chanced to speak to him. He was constantly depreciating himself and belittling his ability. Indeed, I have rarely seen any one who depreciated a splendid ability so much as he did. Yet he has so entirely overcome these faults by audible suggestion that no one would suspect that he had ever lacked self-appreciation or confidence, or that he had been a victim of shyness.

He tells me that he used to go out in the country and talk to himself seriously about his failings. “Now, Arthur, either there is something in you or there is not; and I am going to find out,” he would say. “Do not be a fool. You are just as good as anybody else, so long as you behave as well. Hold up your head and be a man. Do not be afraid to face anybody. Go about among people as though you were somebody. Quit this everlasting self-depreciation, self-effacement. You are God’s child, and you have just as good a right on this glad green earth as anybody else. Do not go about apologizing for being alive, or imagining you are taking up room which belongs to others.”

He says that he also derives very great benefit from praising and appreciating himself audibly when he has done unusually well, or has acquitted himself as a man. On such occasions he will say: “Arthur, that was fine! You did splendidly! I am proud of you. That just shows what you are capable of. Do as well in every instance, and you will amount to something in the world and be somebody.”

I know of nothing so helpful for the timid, those who lack faith in themselves, as the habit of constantly affirming their own importance, their own power, their own divinity. When a man once sees that he is divine, once gets a glimpse of his own capability, he will never be content to wallow in the mud and mire of things; nor will he doubt his own kingship. The trouble is that men do not think half enough of themselves; do not accurately measure their ability; do not put the right estimate upon their possibilities. We berate ourselves, belittle, efface ourselves, because we do not see the larger, diviner man in us.

The objective side of man has a wonderful power to inspire and to encourage the subjective side; to arouse the subconscious mentality where all latent power and possibilities lie. Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.

The majority of people call out but a very small percentage of these latent forces which are waiting to serve them. Many pass the half-century mark before some emergency or crisis in their life lifts the lid off their possibilities, and multitudes go through life without ever getting a glimpse of their powers.

Many a family has eked out a miserable existence in poverty and drudgery while there was a fortune in minerals or oils in the very soil which they owned. Millions have died in mental penury, died weaklings, when they had within their own natures vast possibilities of power which they never uncovered, never utilized.

As miners have died poor while holding claims which covered great wealth, so vast multitudes of people die poor without ever working the rich mines within them.

The trouble with us is that we do not make a loud enough call upon the Great Within of us, our higher, more potent selves. We are too timid, too tame in our demands.

“Affirm that which you wish, and it will be manifest in your life.” Affirm it confidently, with the utmost faith, without any doubt of what you affirm.

Assert your possession of the things you need; of the qualities you long to own. Force your mind toward your goal; hold it there steadily, persistently, for this is the mental condition that creates. The negative mind, which doubts and wavers, creates nothing. “Nerve us with incessant affirmatives; do not bark against the bad; but chant the beauties of the good.”

“I, myself, am good fortune,” says Walt Whitman.

If we could only realize that the very attitude of assuming that we are the real embodiment of the thing we long to be or to attain, that we possess the good things we long for, not that we possess all the qualities of good, but that we are these qualities—with the constant affirming, “I myself am good luck, good fortune; I am myself a part of the great creative, sustaining principle of the universe, because my real, divine self and my Father are one”—what a revolution would come to earth’s toilers!

XII. DESTRUCTIVE AND
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTION

RIMINALS are mental criminals first. The deed itself is merely the physical acting out of the crime which they have rehearsed so many times in their imagination.

An ex-convict who served twenty-five years in the different penitentiaries of New York State said that he did not have the slightest conscious thought of ever becoming a criminal. But he had a natural love for doing things which seemed impossible to others, and when he went by a rich man’s residence he could not help thinking out different ways of entering the house in the night, until he finally attempted it. He took great pride in going from room to room while everybody was asleep and getting out without waking any one. Every time he did this he felt a sense of triumph, as though he had done something worthy of praise. He said he did not rob so much for the value of the things he stole as to gratify his passion for taking risks, and he could hardly believe it when he found that he was actually doing the things he had contemplated until they became a part of his nature. When he was arrested the first time, it did not seem possible to him that he could be a criminal.

This shows what a dangerous thing it is to hold in the mind a wrong suggestion, for it tends to become a part of us, and, before we realize it, we are like our thought.

Professional burglars tell us that for years before they fell they committed all sorts of thefts in their imagination. They would think out ingenious ways of entering houses and accomplishing their ends without detection.

They dwelt upon the thought of crime so long that, before they were aware of it, they had actually committed the deed. The criminal suggestion was held in mind until it became incorporated in their life structure, and they were amazed to find themselves criminals. Many of them had no thought of ever committing actual crime when they first began to think about it, but the criminal thought, the criminal suggestion, did its work.

Who can picture the havoc which the suspicious suggestion has wrought in innocent lives? Think of the influence of employers holding the thought of suspicion regarding their servants or other employees.

Servants have actually been made dishonest by other persons perpetually holding the suspicion that they were dishonest. This thought suggests dishonesty to the suspected perhaps for the first time, and being constantly held takes root and grows, and bears the fruit of theft. The old proverb, “If you have the name, you might as well have the game,” is put into action many times. It is simply cruel to hold a suspicious thought of another until you have positive proof. That other person’s mind is sacred; you have no right to invade it with your miserable thoughts and pictures of suspicion. You should not indulge in such thoughts of yourself, any more than you would allow yourself to hold thoughts of blacker sin or crime. Many a being has been made wretched and miserable for years; has been depressed and borne down by the uncharitable, wicked thoughts of others.

Many people scatter fear thoughts, doubt thoughts, failure thoughts wherever they go; and these take root in minds that might otherwise be free from them and therefore happy, confident, and successful.

Who can ever estimate the human tragedy, the suffering, the failures, caused by hypnotizing oneself by vicious thoughts, or becoming hypnotized through the wrong thoughts of others?

The time will come when we shall have more sympathy for those who go wrong, and even for criminals; because we shall know how powerfully human minds are influenced by the vicious thoughts of others.

Many a youth who has been thrown into prison for some minor offense has been changed into a hardened criminal by constant association with the criminal classes; by being cut off from all communication and association with the good, and with no possibility of even seeing good books. The perpetual criminal suggestions about him were held in his mind so long that he became morbid, surcharged with criminal tendencies. If, instead of being locked up, he could be put upon a huge farm in a beautiful section of the country, with beautiful surroundings of mountains, lakes, flowers, trees and grass, and placed under kindly, educative influences, it would be possible to reform the criminal in a great majority of cases. The substitution of prison surroundings, the consciousness that he is cut off from the world he loves—from friends, from healthy influences, from all possibility of carrying out his ambitions—disheartens and discourages him, and his mind soon coincides with the continual suggestions around him.

We are creatures of suggestion. We get them from newspapers, books, from every one with whom we come in contact. The atmosphere is full of them. We are constantly giving them to ourselves. In other words, our characters are largely made up from various kinds of suggestion.

We all know how we are influenced by a powerful play or a powerful book.

I know a lady who reads the most tragic and emotional stories she can get hold of; and she says she is often so affected by a book that she is obliged to go to bed for an entire day at a time. So powerfully does the suggestion in the book take possession of her, that, for the time, she lives the life that is depicted there. She feels that she is one of the characters she is reading about.

It is not difficult to trace many a criminal’s acts to the graphic suggestions of criminal novels, the exciting stories of murder and plunder which he began to read when a child.

People with criminal tendencies love to read stories of crime and hairbreadth escapes. They are great detective-story readers. Some youths unconsciously inflame their imagination thus until they become abnormal. They develop a morbid desire actually to do the criminal deed which they have performed so many times mentally.

Think of the awful responsibility of throwing out in picture, in cartoon, in print, the daily suggestion of scandal, of murder, of suicide, of crime in all its forms, with all the insidious suggestiveness which lives in detailed description!

Some time ago the mayor of one of our western cities requested the editors of the daily papers to refrain from publishing the details of suicides, because he said their publication had caused an alarming epidemic of suicides in that community.

There is no doubt that many a criminal is serving a sentence which ought to be served by those who have influenced him to commit the crime for which he is being punished.

Indelible and satanic is the taint of the evil suggestion which a lewd, questionable picture or story leaves in the mind. Nothing else more fatally mars the ideals of life and lowers the standard of manhood and womanhood.

The suggestion of impurity in trashy literature is responsible for a great deal of dissipation; for blasted hopes and blighted lives. The same is true of suggestiveness in art. Many impure artists have made their fortunes and their reputations by treading upon forbidden ground, by going just as near the point of legal prohibition in their pictures as possible.

If young people only realized what a terrible thing it is to get even a suggestion of impurity into the mind, they would never read an author whose lines drip with the very gall of death. They would not look at those dangerous books which lead their readers as near the edge of indecency as possible without stepping over. To describe impurity in rosy, glowing, seductive, suggestive language, is but the refinement of the house of death.

We have all had the exalted experience, the marvellous tonic, the uplift, that has come from the suggestion in a play or a book depicting a great hero. How heroic and noble and self-sacrificing we feel for a long time, and how resolved we are to become like the hero in the play or the story! This is a good illustration of the power suggestion is constantly playing in our experience all through life.

How important it is that from childhood we should be in the atmosphere of uplifting, encouraging, cheerful, optimistic, loving ideals! Teachers tell us that in the schools in the slums of cities there are children who never smile, who are always sad and gloomy because of the terrible influence in their homes; where there is a constant suggestion of suffering, of filth, of profanity and of impurity; where all the ideals are low and debasing.

I have known bright, healthy, refined orphan children to be completely transformed by being placed in coarse families, where hard, brutal suggestions were held constantly before their minds until their dispositions and characters were hardened, and all that was noblest and best in their natures was petrified.

It is easy to account for a hard, cold, selfish nature when we find that the child has held these qualities as perpetual suggestions in the mind from infancy. Sweetness and light and beauty of character are not developed in an atmosphere thick with hatred and envy and poisoned with jealousy and selfishness. Like produces like; this is an inexorable law everywhere. Love is not generated in an atmosphere of bitterness; unselfishness and sympathy are not fostered in an environment of greed and heartlessness.

Dr. Elwood Worcester, leader of the Emmanuel movement in Boston is a firm believer in the power of suggestion to mould the character of the child. He says: “There is a very easy and rational way by which many childish faults can be removed; that is, by making good suggestions to our children while they are in a state of natural sleep.

“My method is to address the sleeping child in a low and gentle tone, telling it that I am about to speak to it, and that it will hear me, but that my words will not disturb it nor will it awake. Then I give the necessary words, repeating them in different language several times. By this means I have removed childish fears and corrected bad habits. I have checked nervous twitchings, anger, violence, a disposition to lie, and I have improved speech in stammering children.”

We are so largely products of our environment; we are so sensitive to the suggestion dominant in our minds, that we can have a powerful influence over our destiny by auto-suggestion. We can often so dominate a vicious thought in our environment by a counteracting self-suggestion as to completely destroy it. The powerful self-suggestion of purity will quickly annihilate the opposite suggestion from others. The self-suggestions of justice and truth will quickly overmaster the suggestions of injustice and falsehood from those about us.

“As a therapeutic agency and an uplifting ethical force,” says Dr. Worcester, “auto-suggestion can hardly be exaggerated. The various troubles, physical and mental, which are amenable to its influence make a long list. In these and other troubles the patient can, as Shakespeare says, ‘minister to himself.’ What a gospel of hope is here for the depressed and unhappy! What a chance of redemption for those who are the slaves of circumstance or of their own folly!”

It is wholly a question of making the demand, the call, upon our better self so emphatic, so vigorous, and so appealing that it will arouse our higher nature. Then there will be a leaping forth of an overpowering energy of the Godlike in us.

When we see a man who has been but a mere apology for a human being, a curse to the race for half a lifetime, converted, transformed, by the love of some noble woman or friend, become a great power for good, we are apt to think that this transformation, this miracle is due to some force, some power outside of himself. But the power was within him all the time, waiting to be aroused, to be awakened. When the right suggestion comes, and is made emphatic, vigorous enough, the divine within us will respond.

People who are “down on their luck” are, as a rule, the victims of their own negative suggestion. If they could only substitute the positive, the creative, for the negative, the destructive suggestion which enslaves them, they would win instead of losing.

Darwin has shown that every mental state has a corresponding physical expression, and that if you assume one you are likely to experience the other. Anger, for instance, expresses itself physically in violent language, clenching the fists, slamming the door, or in other forms. And as a man may make himself angry by doing these things, so he can put himself into a devotional frame of mind by assuming an attitude of prayer.

Some people are so happily constituted that they are constantly rejuvenating and refreshening and elevating themselves by the habitual appeal to their minds through suggestion. They keep so close to the divine power that they feel its thrill and are propelled by the great divine current.

How often we are surprised at the discovery of some unexpected power or possibility within ourselves, which has been brought to the surface by the suggestion of some book, or by some friend who believed in us, or saw in us what we could not see ourselves!

The human mind may be attuned to any key, high or low, base or noble, by the power of suggestion. The suggestion may be in a word spoken by oneself or by another; it may come from a book or a picture; it may emanate from the presence of a friend or of an enemy, from a grand, heroic character, or a mean, cowardly one. From hundreds of sources it may come, from within or without, but wherever it comes from, it leaves its mark on the life for good or ill.

Suggestion in its highest form is the appeal to our higher self to come into recognition of its own. No matter how bad a man may seem to be, there is a better man within him. No matter how low he may have sunk morally, to all outward appearance, there is something absolutely spotless within him, something which has never been smirched and can never be, and which will ultimately claim its birthright and come to its own in splendor and power.

No matter how soiled a banknote becomes it is always redeemable so long as there is any distinguishable mark of its genuineness. There is something within every human being which will ultimately redeem him, no matter how far he may have drifted from the right. There is a better self in the worst criminal in our penitentiaries which will some day, somewhere, redeem him, bring him to his own. The God within him will finally triumph. Every human being some time, somewhere, will come into harmony with the divine. Every child of the King will ultimately inherit his kingdom.

XIII. WORRY, THE DISEASE OF
THE AGE

NE who could rid the world of worry would render greater service to the race than all of the inventors and discoverers that ever lived.

We Americans pity ignorant savages who live in terror of their cruel gods, their demons which keep them in abject slavery, but we ourselves are the slaves of a demon which blasts our hopes, blights our happiness, casts its hideous shadow across all our pleasures, destroys our sleep, mars our health, and keeps us in misery most of our lives.

This monster dogs us from the cradle to the grave. There is no occasion so sacred but it is there. Unbidden it comes to the wedding and the funeral alike. It is at every reception, every banquet; it occupies a seat at every table.

No human intellect can estimate the unutterable havoc and ruin wrought by worry. It has forced genius to do the work of mediocrity; it has caused more failures, more broken hearts, more blasted hopes, than any other one cause since the dawn of the world.

What have not men done under the pressure of worry! They have plunged into all sorts of vice; have become drunkards, drug fiends; have sold their very souls in their efforts to escape this monster.

Think of the homes which it has broken up; the ambitions it has ruined; the hopes and prospects it has blighted! Think of the suicide victims of this demon! If there is any devil in existence, is it not worry, with all its attendant progeny of evils?

Yet, in spite of all the tragic evils that follow in its wake, a visitor from another world would get the impression that worry is one of our dearest, most helpful friends, so closely do we hug it to ourselves and so loath are we to part from it.

Is it not unaccountable that people who know perfectly well that success and happiness both depend on keeping themselves in condition to get the most possible out of their energies should harbor in their minds the enemy of this very success and happiness? Is it not strange that they should form this habit of anticipating evils that will probably never come, when they know that anxiety and fretting will not only rob them of peace of mind and strength and ability to do their work, but also of precious years of life?

Many a strong man is tied down, like Gulliver, by Lilliputians—bound hand and foot by the little worries and vexations he has never learned to conquer.

What would be thought of a business man who would keep in his service employees known to have been robbing him for years, stealing a little here and a little there every day? Yet one may be keeping in his mental business house, at the very source of his power, a thief infinitely worse than one who merely steals money or material things; a thief who robs him of energy, saps his vitality, and bankrupts him of all that makes life worth while.

Do we pity the pagans who lacerate themselves in all sorts of cruel ways in their worship? Yet many of us constantly torment ourselves by all sorts of mental instruments of torture.

We borrow trouble; endure all our lives the woe of crossing and recrossing bridges weeks and years before we come to them; do disagreeable tasks mentally over and over again before we reach them; anticipate our drudgery and constantly suffer from the apprehension of terrible things that never happen.

I know women who never open a telegram without trembling, for they feel sure it will announce the death of a friend or some terrible disaster. If their children have gone for a sail or a picnic, they are never easy a moment during their absence; they work themselves into a fever of anxiety for fear that some accident will befall them, that something awful will happen to them.

Many a mother fritters away more energy in useless frets and fears for her children, in nervous strain over this or that, than she uses for her daily routine of domestic work. She wonders why she is so exhausted at the close of the day, and never dreams that she has thrown away the greater part of her force.

Is it not strange that people will persist in allowing little worries, petty vexations, and unnecessary frictions to grind life away at such a fearful rate that old age stares them in the face in middle life? Look at the women who are shrivelled and shrunken and aged at thirty, not because of the hard work they have done, or the real troubles they have had, but because of habitual fretting, which has helped nobody, but has brought discord and unhappiness to their homes.

Somewhere I read of a worrying woman who made a list of possible unfortunate events and happenings which she felt sure would come to pass and be disastrous to her happiness and welfare. The list was lost, and to her amazement, when she recovered it, a long time afterwards, she found that not a single unfortunate prediction in the whole catalogue of disasters had taken place.

Is not this a good suggestion for worriers? Write down everything which you think is going to turn out badly, and then put the list aside. You will be surprised to see what a small percentage of the doleful things ever come to pass.

It is a pitiable thing to see vigorous men and women, who have inherited godlike qualities and bear the impress of divinity, wearing anxious faces and filled with all sorts of fear and uncertainty, worrying about yesterday, to-day, to-morrow—everything imaginable.

In entering New York by train every morning, I notice business men with hard, tense expressions on their faces, leaning forward when the train approaches the station, as if they could hasten its progress and save time, many of them getting up from their seats and rushing toward the door several minutes before the train stops. The anxiety in their every movement; the hurried nervousness in their manner; and their hard, drawn countenances—all are indications of an abnormal life.

No man can utilize his normal power who dissipates his nervous energy in useless anxiety. Nothing will sap one’s vitality and blight one’s ambition or detract from one’s real power in the world more than the worrying habit.

Work kills no one, but worry has killed multitudes. It is not the doing things which injures us so much as the dreading to do them—not only performing them mentally over and over again, but anticipating something disagreeable in their performance.

Many of us approach an unpleasant task in much the same condition as a runner who begins his start such a long distance away that by the time he reaches his objective point—the ditch or the stream which is to test his agility—he is too exhausted to jump across.

Worry not only saps vitality and wastes energy, but it also seriously affects the quality of one’s work. It cuts down ability. A man cannot get the highest quality of efficiency into his work when his mind is troubled. The mental faculties must have perfect freedom before they will give out their best. A troubled brain cannot think clearly, vigorously, and logically. The attention cannot be concentrated with anything like the same force when the brain cells are poisoned with anxiety as when they are fed by pure blood and are clean and unclouded. The blood of chronic worriers is vitiated with poisonous chemical substances and broken-down tissues, according to Prof. Elmer Gates and other noted scientists, who have shown that the passions and the harmful emotions cause actual chemical changes in the secretions and generate poisonous substances in the body which are fatal to healthy growth and action.

The brain cells are constantly bathed in the blood, from which they draw their nourishment, and when the blood is loaded with the poison of fear, worry, anger, hatred, or jealousy, the protoplasm of those delicate cells becomes hard and is thus materially injured.

The most pathetic effect of worry is its impairment of the thinking powers. It so clogs the brain and paralyzes thought that the results of the worrier’s work merely mock his ambition, and often lead to the drink or drug habit. Its continued friction robs the brain cells of an opportunity to renew themselves; and so after awhile there is a breakdown of the nervous system and then the worrier suffers from insomnia and other nervous ailments, and sometimes becomes hopelessly insane.

If you never accomplish anything else in life, get rid of worry. There are no greater enemies of harmony than little anxieties and petty cares. Do not flies aggravate a nervous horse more than his work? Do not little naggings, constantly touching him with the whip, or jerking at the reins, fret and worry him much more than the labor of drawing the carriage?

It is the little pin-pricks, the petty annoyances of our every-day life, that mar our comfort and happiness and rob us of more strength than the great troubles which we nerve ourselves to meet. It is the perpetual scolding and fault-finding of an irritable man or woman which ruins the entire peace and happiness of many a home.

An habitual worrier—an aged woman—said to her physician, “My head feels dull-like, and I’ve kinder lost the power to worry over things.” A great many people would be much troubled were they to lose the power to worry over things. They think it their duty to worry. They would not feel that they were conscientious or faithful if they were not always anxious over what they were doing. They would not think they were showing a proper interest in it.

Anticipating a thing tends to bring it to us. Worry about disease is a disease producer. It is well known that many victims of the great plagues of history have been slain simply by fear and dread.

Professor Gates says that by directing his thought to one of his thumbs, and holding it there, in ten minutes’ time the thumb was gorged with blood, and the temperature was two degrees higher than in the other thumb. This is what happens when the worry thought—the terror thought—of some disease is continually focused on a part of the body which we think has been affected by heredity.

Great numbers of men and women become hypochondriacs by dwelling for a long time on diseases they fear. If they happen to feel a little stupid or absent-minded, if their minds do not always work just right, as is often the case with even the most healthy brains, they immediately surmise that there is something wrong with their heads.

There is no doubt that the “quick lunch” habit, the habit of bolting the food without proper mastication, is a fruitful source of indigestion, and this has a great deal to do with the worry habit of the American people.

The digestive organs are extremely sensitive to worry, and when the digestion is interfered with the whole physical economy is thrown into disorder.

Worry and fear will not only whiten the hair, but will also cause premature baldness—a condition known as nervous baldness. Another result is a loss of tone and elasticity in the facial muscles. “The lips, cheeks, and lower jaw,” says Darwin, “all sink downward from their own weight.”

Worry not only makes a woman look older, but also actually makes her older. It is a chisel which cuts cruel furrows in the face. I have seen one so completely changed by a few weeks of anxiety that the whole countenance had a different expression and the individual seemed almost like another person.

One of the worst forms of worry is the brooding over failure. It blights the ambition, deadens the purpose and defeats the very object the worrier has in view.

Some people have the unfortunate habit of brooding over their past lives, castigating themselves for their shortcomings and mistakes, until their whole vision is turned backward instead of forward, and they see everything in a distorted light, because they are looking only on the shadow side.

The longer the unfortunate picture which has caused trouble remains in the mind, the more thoroughly it becomes imbedded there, and the more difficult it is to remove it.

Did you ever hear of any good coming to any human being from worry? Did it ever help anybody to better his condition? Does it not always—everywhere—do just the opposite by impairing the health, exhausting the vitality, lessening efficiency?

Are we not convinced that a power beyond our control runs the universe, that every moment of worry detracts from our success capital and makes our failure more probable; that every bit of anxiety and fretfulness leaves its mark on the body, interrupts the harmony of our physical and mental well-being, and cripples efficiency, and that this condition is at war with our highest endeavor?

Let us then cease to worry. Let us stop the habit—if we have it—of telling everybody about our troubles. What we want to do, in order to drive out troubles, is to forget them—bury them—not keep them alive by airing them continually.

A great deal can be done to correct the causes of worry by keeping up the health standard. A good digestion, a clear conscience, and sound sleep kill a lot of trouble. Worry thrives best under abnormal conditions. It cannot get much of a hold on a man with a superb physique—a man who lives a clean, sane life. It thrives on the weak—those of low vitality whose reserve force has been exhausted.

We see women resorting to massage, electricity, exercises, chin straps, wrinkle plasters, and all sorts of things to erase the terrible ravages of worry and anxiety; apparently ignorant of the fact that the supreme remedy—the great panacea—is in the mind, they continue to worry as to how they shall get rid of the effects of worry!

Nothing else will so quickly drive away worry as the habit of cheerfulness, of making the best of things, of refusing to see the ugly side of life.

When you feel fear or anxiety entering your thought, just fill your mind instantly with courage, hope, and confidence. Refuse to let any enemies of your happiness and success camp in your mind. Drive out the whole brood of vampires.

You can kill worry thoughts easily when you know the antidote; and this you always have in your mind. You do not have to go to a drug-store or a physician for it. It is always with you—always ready. All you have to do is to substitute hope, courage, cheerfulness, serenity, for despondency, discouragement, pessimism, worry. Opposite thoughts will not live together. The presence of one excludes the other.

“People ask me daily,” said Patti, “when they look at my face, without a wrinkle, what I do to keep so young. I tell them that whenever I have felt a wrinkle coming I have laughed it away. My advice to the woman who wants to remain young is: ‘Be happy—don’t worry, but walk.’ ”

XIV. FEAR, THE CURSE OF THE
RACE

HAT is fear? It is absolutely nothing. It is a mental illusion. There is no reality behind it. It is to the sane adult what the ghost is to the child.

There is not a single redeeming feature about fear or any of its numerous progeny. It is always, everywhere, an unmitigated curse. Although there is no reality in fear, no truth behind it, yet everywhere we see people who are slaves to this monster of the imagination.

Fear is one of the most deadly instruments for marring human lives. It has a paralyzing, blighting influence upon the whole being. It impoverishes the blood and destroys health by impairing the digestion, cutting off nutrition, and lowering the physical and mental vitality. It crushes hope, kills courage, and so enfeebles the mind’s action that it cannot create or produce.

All work done when one is suffering from a sense of fear or foreboding has little efficiency. Fear strangles originality, daring, boldness; it kills individuality, and weakens all the mental processes. Great things are never done under a sense of fear of some impending danger. Fear always indicates weakness, the presence of cowardice. What a slaughterer of years, what a sacrificer of happiness and ambitions, what a ruiner of careers this monster has been! The Bible says, “A broken spirit drieth the bones.” It is well known that mental depression—melancholy—will check very materially the glandular secretions of the body and literally dry up the tissues.

Fear depresses normal mental action, and renders one incapable of acting wisely in an emergency, for no one can think clearly and act wisely when paralyzed by fear.

When a man becomes melancholy and discouraged about his affairs, when he is filled with fear that he is going to fail, and is haunted by the spectre of poverty and a suffering family, before he realizes it, he attracts the very thing he dreads, and the prosperity is crushed out of his business. But he is a mental failure first.

If, instead of giving up to his fear, a man would persist in keeping prosperity in his mind, assume a hopeful, optimistic attitude, and would conduct his business in a systematic, economical, far-sighted manner, actual failure would be comparatively rare. But when a man becomes discouraged, when he loses heart and grip, and becomes panic-stricken, he is not in a position to make the effort which is absolutely necessary to bring victory, and there is a shrinkage all along the line.

He is in no condition to ward off the evil before which he cowers. His mental attitude lowers his vitality, lessens his powers of resistance, vitiates his efficiency, and ruins his resourcefulness.

One of the worst forms of fear is that of a foreboding of some evil to come, which hangs over the life like a threatening cloud over a volcano before an eruption.

Some people are always suffering from this peculiar phase of fear. They are apprehensive that some great misfortune is coming to them, that they are going to lose their money or their position; or they are afraid of accident, or that some fatal disease is developing in them. If their children are away they see them in all sorts of catastrophes—railroad wrecks, burning cars, or shipwrecks. They are always picturing the worst. “You never can tell what will happen,” they say, “and it is better to prepare for the worst.”

I know a woman who went through the most heartrending experiences for years in anticipation of a catastrophe which she believed would prove so overwhelming that it could not possibly leave any hope behind; but when the thing occurred that she had dreaded for so long, she was surprised to find that it did not overwhelm her.

How we suffer all our lives from the fear of accident—the fear of being run over in the streets, the fear of being maimed, of losing our limbs, the fear of railroad accidents, of accidents on the ocean, the fear of lightning, of earthquakes—fear of all kinds! And yet here we are at the present moment, most of us without the loss of a finger, and many without even a scratch or a scar, although we have, perhaps, travelled a great deal over the world for a lifetime.

How we are dogged with this fear fiend all our lives!

Many women have such a terror of snakes that they never take any comfort while in the country. They are always imagining they are going to step on one or run across one. This dread ruins their vacations, for they never dare go in the woods or walk on the grass.

I have known women who lived in rattlesnake regions to be so terror-stricken for fear they should run across these snakes that they never dared go anywhere alone, and always lived in anticipation of seeing these terrible creatures.

Some people who travel in the tropics have such fear of poisonous insects and reptiles that they never have a minute’s peace while they are there. They are always imagining these terrible creatures are crawling over them in the night.

I know a man who is a born coward regarding physical pain, and who lives in such terror of sickness and disease that he makes himself constantly wretched by anticipating maladies which never affect him. If he feels a cold coming on, he is sure he is going to have an acute attack of the grip. If he has a sore throat, he thinks it is going to develop into tonsilitis, and that he will not be able to swallow. If he has a little palpitation after eating a hearty meal, caused by undue pressure upon the heart, he imagines he is going to be a victim of serious heart trouble.

He has become so finicky about his health that he is a perfect nuisance to his family and to his friends. He is always wanting windows closed, or more heat, or he wants—nobody knows what he will want. His friends do not like to invite him to go anywhere with them, because he is so particular about his food, and he always imagines he is going to be burned up in a hotel or killed on a train or steamboat.

It is true this is an exaggerated case; but there are vast multitudes of people who are under a similar domination of fear and apprehension all their lives. I know people who never get happiness out of life, except in little snatches. They work like slaves to get together enough property to carry them through, as they say, yet they never enjoy it. They look on life as terribly serious. They are always afraid they are going to lose their property, or that something fearful is going to happen.

The most deplorable waste of energy in human life is caused by the fatal habit of anticipating evil, of fearing what the future has in store for us, and under no circumstances can the fear or worry be justified by the situation, for it is always an imaginary one, utterly groundless and without foundation.

What we fear is invariably something that has not yet happened. It does not exist; hence is not a reality. If you are actually suffering from a disease you have feared, then fear only aggravates every painful feature of your illness and makes its fatal issue more probable.

The fear habit shortens life, for it impairs all the physiological processes. Its power is shown by the fact that it actually changes the chemical composition of the secretions of the body. Fear victims not only age prematurely but they also die prematurely.

Sensitive, nervous people, and those who are physically weak, suffer most from fear. We all know how the imagination tends to exaggerate everything, and people with sensitive, nervous organizations, and those in feeble health usually imagine that the worst possible will happen. Strong, robust health itself will kill a great many fears which cause intense suffering when the vitality is low and the power of resistance is weak.

Many people live so perpetually under the dominion of this demon, that they never develop normally. As children, their lives were starved and stunted; they were inoculated with the germ of fear way back in childhood when the mother was constantly reminding the little ones of terrible results which would follow if they did this or that. Fear shadows were constantly projected into their susceptible little minds, until the demon became so thoroughly intrenched in their lives that it follows them through the years like a hideous ghost, hovering round to destroy their peace of mind and happiness. Every ugly thing told to a child, every shock, every fright given him will remain like splinters in the flesh to torture him all his life long. Anxiety, fear, horror, will twine themselves round these memories.

A mother little realizes the cruel thing she is doing when she impresses upon a child’s plastic mind the terrible image of fear, which, like letters cut on a sapling, grows wider and deeper with age.

A perfectly normal child, with no inherited fear tendencies, would not know the meaning of fear. It was not intended that we should be followed and hounded through life by this demon. It is a creature born in our own brain, the offspring of our own thinking and acting. Everywhere we see the terrible havoc that fear has wrought in human lives. The premature wrinkles, the gray hair, the stooping shoulders, the anxious faces we see on all sides are the outpicturing of foreboding fear thought.

A noted nerve specialist says: “Thousands of times I have been compelled to recognize the sad fact that at least eighty per cent of morbidly timid children could have been cured and saved, in time, by common-sense principles of psychological and physiological hygiene, in which the main factor is suggestion inspired by wholesome courage.”

It is much easier for the mother or nurse to frighten a child into submission than to soothe it, reason with it, and the weak, ignorant, thoughtless mother constantly appeals to the child’s fear as the quickest, most effective means of securing obedience.

“Fear runs like a baleful thread through the whole web of life from beginning to end,” says Dr. Holcomb. “We are born into the atmosphere of fear and dread, and the mother who bore us had lived in the same atmosphere for weeks and months before we were born. We are afraid of our parents, afraid of our teachers, afraid of our playmates, afraid of ghosts, afraid of rules and regulations and punishments, afraid of the doctor, the dentist, the surgeon. Our adult life is a state of chronic anxiety, which is fear in a milder form. We are afraid of failure in business, afraid of disappointments and mistakes, afraid of enemies, open or concealed; afraid of poverty, afraid of public opinion, afraid of accidents, of sickness, of death, and unhappiness after death. Man is like a haunted animal from the cradle to the grave, the victim of real or imaginary fears, not only his own, but those reflected upon him from the superstitions, self-deceptions, sensory illusions, false beliefs, and concrete errors of the whole human race, past and present.”

Most of us are foolish children, afraid of our shadows, so handicapped in a thousand ways that we cannot get efficiency into our life work.

The recent spectacle of multitudes of people (many of them waiting in line all night) drawing their money out of perfectly solid banks and trust companies is a good illustration of the power of fear to bring about a financial panic, even in the midst of prosperity. There was absolutely no real cause for this panic which, for a time, played such havoc in the financial world. It was started by gamblers and promoters, who were posing as bankers; men who used sacred trust assets to rig the stock market, and to promote their own schemes generally. This financial storm came out of a clear sky, and when we were enjoying unusual prosperity. Capital was well employed; comparatively few people were out of work in the entire country. Almost any one, with any sort of ability, who was willing to work, could find employment. There was no extended economic disturbance anywhere, and the business of our marvellous country was never in better condition.

The moment a distrust is expressed by a few leading financiers in a town, weaker, less acute minds naturally magnify their fears and spread their doubts until the whole community is affected. Then the panic contagion trickles through the masses until we hear hard times talked about by the day laborer, discussed everywhere, in the cars, on the streets, in the saloons, and the imagination pictures multitudes out of work and hungry.

In other words, the mind is set toward the things people expect and believe are coming, and, of course, this tends to bring them about. If they would stop talking down and would talk up, they could arrest these mental hard-time panics, as confidence is almost omnipotent. Of course panics often have a real cause—as the shortage of crops—but even then they are exaggerated very greatly by fear, which always predicts infinitely worse conditions than actually materialize.

What sufferers many of us are for fear of the criticism and ridicule of others! How many people live in terror of Mrs. Grundy, or what people will think! Every step they take in life they suffer from fear of what others will say. Many people are more afraid of ridicule than almost anything else. Oh, how many victims fear has put into the grave! It has driven people into all sorts of crime through unbalancing the mind. It has caused terrible tragedies in human life.

One pathetic case is that of an Indiana farmer who was asked to come to the office of his friend, a physician, supposedly for a friendly purpose. He found the members of the lunacy board there to inquire into his sanity.

“My God, John!” he exclaimed, looking at his friend, “would you send me to the mad-house?” After this exclamation he became speechless, then unconscious, half paralyzed, and died in a few hours.

A Dutch painter went into a room filled with skeletons and other anatomical subjects, in order to make sketches for a painting. He was weary, and fell asleep. Suddenly he was aroused by an earthquake shock. The awful picture of shaking skeletons that confronted him on awakening so terrified the painter that he threw himself out of a window, and, although he received no physical injury, he died of a nervous tremor.

There are many instances of soldiers who have died of fright because they thought they had been fatally shot, when the bullets or shells had not even penetrated the body.

Dr. William E. Parker, of New Orleans, says he was once asked to attend a big negro who had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. The students in charge of the ambulance had frightened the man by telling him that he had been mortally wounded by the bullet which had struck him during a fight. Although this negro was big, robust, and black, yet he became almost white with fear, and “the convulsive tremors that shook him from time to time revealed a state of collapse that might end in death at any time.” Investigation showed that there had been no outward flow of blood, but that the negro had been told by the students that there might be a fatal internal hemorrhage. He knew he had been hit, for he had seen the hole made by the bullet in his clothing, and his fear increased rather than diminished. Examination revealed the fact that the bullet had not entered his body at all. It had struck a button and flattened out, and when his clothing was removed it dropped to the floor. When the doctor held up the flattened bullet for the negro to see, he was in a state of collapse. In an instant the blood returned to his face, the pulse and the temperature quickly became normal, a grateful sparkle lit up the almost glassy eyeballs, and the broadest possible grin spread over the face of the erstwhile dying man.

The negro got down from the table and, after apologizing for the trouble he had given, walked away in perfect health, although only a few minutes before he had been very near death.

It is well known that when a man’s foot is caught in what is called a “frog in the switch” of a railroad track so that he cannot withdraw it, and he realizes that a train is rushing upon him with no possibility of his escaping, the terror of impending death from the approaching train so poisons his blood that, even though he is rescued, death usually results.

Courage should be taught in the schools, because everything that men strive for—success and happiness—are dependent upon it. Then, again, it enhances tremendously the power of all the other mental faculties. Courage compensates for many defects and weaknesses.

A man who is filled with fear is not a real man. He is a puppet, a mannikin, an apology of a man.

Quit fearing things that may never happen, just as you would quit any bad practice which has caused you suffering. Fill your mind with courage, hope, and confidence.

Do not wait until fear thoughts become intrenched in your mind and your imagination. Do not dwell upon them. Apply the antidote instantly, and the enemies will flee. There is no fear so great or intrenched so deeply in the mind that it cannot be neutralized or entirely eradicated by its opposite. The opposite suggestion will kill it.

Once Dr. Chalmers was riding on a stagecoach beside the driver, and he noticed that John kept hitting the off leader a severe crack with his whip. When he asked him why he did this, John answered: “Away yonder there is a white stone; that off leader is afraid of that stone; so by the crack of my whip and the pain in his legs I want to get his idea off from it.” Dr. Chalmers went home, elaborated the idea, and wrote “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” You must drive out fear by putting a new idea into the mind.

Fear, in any of its expressions, like worry or anxiety, cannot live an instant in your mind in the presence of the thought, the image of courage, fearlessness, confidence, hope, self-assurance, self-reliance. Fear is a consciousness of weakness. It is only when you doubt your ability to cope with the thing you dread that fear is possible. Fear of disease, even, comes from a consciousness that you will not be able to successfully combat it.

Napoleon used to visit the plague hospitals even when the physicians dreaded to go, and actually put his hands upon the plague-stricken patients. He said the man who was not afraid could vanquish the plague.

Dr. Tuke, in his splendid book, “Influence of the Mind Upon the Body,” says that many diseases are produced by fear, in its various forms. “Insanity, idiocy, paralysis of various muscles and organs, profuse perspirations, cholerina, jaundice, turning of the hair gray in a short time, baldness, sudden decay of the teeth, nervous shock followed by fatal anæmia, uterine troubles, malformation of embryo through the mother, skin disease—such as erysipelas, eczema, and many other diseases,” he declares, “are produced by these terrible health enemies.”

He further says that “when yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, and other malignant diseases obtain a footing in a community, hundreds and thousands of people fall victims to their mental conditions, which invite the attack (by destroying the resisting and protecting power of the body) and insure its fatality.”

During an epidemic of a dreaded contagious disease, people who are especially susceptible and full of fear become panic-stricken through the cumulative effect of hearing the subject talked about and discussed on every hand and the vivid pictures which come from reading the newspapers. Their minds (as in the case of yellow fever) become full of images of the disease, of its symptoms—black vomit, delirium,—and of death, mourning, and funerals.

Dr. W. H. Holcomb, an authority upon contagious diseases, gives it as his opinion that, in a case of extreme fear, no microbes or bacteria are needed to produce an outburst of yellow fever. Fear itself is a contagious disease. It needs no speech or sign to propagate it. It passes from one to another with lightning speed, he says. Thus, malignant influences may be cast around us by even our best friends and would-be helpers.

Dr. Holcomb refers to an extensive epidemic of fear throughout the Southern States, in 1888, when yellow fever was in Jacksonville, Fla. This mental malady, he says, visited all the little towns and villages in the South. There was exhibited on a small scale in those localities that same principle of terror which is manifested in a burning theatre, on a sinking ship, or in a stampeded army, when brave men suddenly become cowards, wise men fools, and merciful men brutes. Truly, something ought to be done for the moral treatment of yellow fever.

A noted authority says that in the case of pulmonary consumption we are now witnessing a non-contagious disease in the very process of transformation into a contagious disease through centuries of fear, worry, and terror. There is no doubt that multitudes of people have developed this dreaded disease mentally from the very deterioration in the body caused by the constant presence of terror in the mind. Dr. Loomis actually classifies tuberculosis among the miasmatic contagious diseases—fear will do the rest.

The recent cholera epidemic in Russia gave a remarkable instance of the paralyzing effect of fright or terror upon people, especially the ignorant classes. Many persons who were taken to the hospitals apparently affected with all the characteristic symptoms of the disease, were found, upon examination, to be suffering from nothing whatever except fear. There was not in reality a single physical indication of the disease itself. The prefect of St. Petersburg was obliged to issue a proclamation to allay the fear panic. Even in cases of real cholera, persons died in fifteen minutes after contracting the disease. There is no doubt that the dread of it increased the fatality of the disease, and hastened the end by destroying or paralyzing the natural resisting power of the body.

The sacred books of all nations, except the Chinese, give much prominence to the motive of fear. It has been used for spiritual control, even as it has been, time out of mind, for discipline in the domestic circle.

Much of our so-called “Christianity” has been merely nominal; superstitions of pagan Europe have intermingled with the religious teachings of Christendom, the fear motive being thus so emphasized as to terrorize the common mind.

Think of the terrible suggestions which the old-time preacher put into the minds of his flock through his sermons on eternal punishment and the unpardonable sin. Think of projecting such horrible pictures upon the mind of a child!

The happiness of vast multitudes of people has been ruined by the fear of punishment after death. I have seen mothers made miserable for many years because their sons or daughters could not accept the doctrine of eternal punishment; could not believe that the Creator would be ultimately foiled in His effort to bring His own children into harmony and happiness.

Who can ever estimate the suffering, the anxiety, the baseless remorse, which the old doctrines of everlasting punishment and hell fire caused among the early Puritans and their descendants? Doubtless the old-time clergymen honestly believed they were justified in using the fear club as a check to crime, and no doubt many people have been kept from committing great offences through fear of eternal punishment; but who can ever estimate the harm, the awful suffering, which these frightful suggestions have caused good people? If the Church in all ages had put the same emphasis upon the power of love to reform and to regenerate as it has upon the awful consequences of sin, the world would be much further advanced to-day and the race would be free from its worst fetter, its greatest enemy—Fear.

Most of us are haunted by fear of something great or small, either in the seen or the unseen world. Millions are tied down by all kinds of foolish superstitions; we are still hampered by traditions, by “bogies” and fears, by myths of good luck and bad luck, that have been handed down from generation to generation. We are still the slaves of ideas born of ignorance, and that have long ago been swept aside by education and science as the baseless figments of a crude civilization or utter savagery.

Many, even, who affect to laugh at silly superstitions, are unconsciously influenced by them. How many intelligent people, for instance, are affected by the superstitions about Friday and the number thirteen! It does not seem possible that a child ten years old can be so silly as to believe that there is any power in mere figures to harm him, yet mature men and women dread them as some tangible evil thing. Some hotels have no room or suite of that number, because they find them unrentable, and many builders will not allow their houses to be so numbered. They use twelve and a half instead.

Think of an inanimate sign, or mechanical figures, which could not even move themselves a hairbreadth in eons of time, think of their moving human beings or having anything whatever to do with their fate! If the number thirteen can influence a human being, how does it do it? There can be no effect without a cause. Can these figures move? Is there any life, any force in them? Can they cause anything? Do they know anything? Is there any intelligence in them? Did any one ever see anything that they have accomplished?

Actors and singers, as a class, are particularly noted for their superstitions. An amusing instance of their slavish subservience to the “13” superstition occurred recently in New York.

Signor Campanini, the Italian director of the Manhattan Opera House, with a number of grand opera “stars,” arrived in New York harbor aboard the North German Lloyd steamer, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, on October 13th. In spite of the pleadings of Oscar Hammerstein, impresario of the Manhattan Opera House, neither the director nor any of the singers could be persuaded to land, because, they said, they dared not take the chance of having bad luck by landing on the thirteenth.

“It is curious, no doubt,” Campanini said to an interviewer, “but most Italians and all artists avoid doing anything important on the thirteenth of the month. Had I landed last night I should have been most unhappy. So would my wife [Eva Tetrazzini]. We would have feared for the success of the Manhattan opera season. Not that we feel ourselves to be the greatest element of success of the company, but some dire catastrophe might come to the company through us. Feeling thus, I would not have braved the hoodoo of landing on October 13th for anything.”

What possible power can an arbitrary day of the week have upon any human being? The day we call Friday is a mere mechanical division of time, a mere arbitrary name of the sixth day of the week, given it by man for his own convenience. Is there any intelligence in the word Friday, any brain, force, or life there? Then, if not, how can it cause any disaster to your enterprises? Nevertheless, the superstition of “Unlucky Friday” has a powerful influence upon multitudes of lives. There are thousands of men and women who would never think of starting on a journey or of beginning an important undertaking on this day.

Then there are others who are slaves to the clairvoyant fortune-tellers. Think of the thousands of people who are made wretchedly unhappy and lose courage and heart because of the cruel predictions of these ignorant people! I know some very intelligent men and women who live under the domination of these fortune quacks. They undertake nothing of importance without consulting the astrologer or clairvoyant. If they lose anything, they immediately go to these people for advice.

Think of the influence of being told that some misfortune will overtake one at a certain age, that he will lose his wife and children at a certain time, or that he will die at the age of forty!

No wonder that many of these things come to pass, because it is a scientific law of thought that what we greatly fear tends to come to us.

When Lord Byron was a boy, he was told by a fortune-teller that he would die in the thirty-seventh year of his age. The thought haunted him, and when he became ill during that year he said there was no hope of his recovery, that it was destined he should die within that year. This conviction destroyed his power of disease resistance, and he succumbed to the malady from which he was suffering. Only recently a New York man committed suicide because his horoscope warned him of three fatal days in his life—the thirteenth, the twenty-seventh, and the thirtieth of a certain month.

It is impossible to convince children who have had colored mammies for nurses that there are not such things as ghosts. They people the darkness with all sorts of hobgoblins, and think the “Bogey Man” will spirit them away if they dare go into a dark place alone. Many white people of the South are saturated with superstition absorbed from their colored mammies.

A volume could be filled with the silly and ignorant superstitions that fetter and hold down not only savage peoples and the uneducated of the higher races, but also millions of the intelligent and educated all over the world. Superstition has always and everywhere accompanied ignorance; the more ignorant a people, the more superstitious they are; and the more enlightened and educated they become, the freer they are from all superstitious ideas.

All errors die hard, but the school and the college, the periodical and the newspaper of to-day are burying-grounds for vast numbers of superstitions. When a young student begins to think for himself, to get his eyes open, he associates his old fears and superstitions with ignorance and is ashamed to be influenced by them any longer.

The best of all cures for superstition or fear is the knowledge that it has no reality, but is only a creature of the imagination, a picture drawn by a morbid mind. The perfectly healthy mind knows no fear.

If fear, in all its phases, could be removed from the human mind, civilization would go forward by leaps and bounds. It is this ghastly spectre that is holding many people down. It causes more suffering, more loss, more misfortune, more failure, and makes more real slaves than any actual factor in human life. Yet, notwithstanding the terrible grip this monster has upon human life, it can be conquered, thrust out of our lives absolutely, as easily as any other mental foe or enemy of our peace and happiness.

The new philosophy teaches us that we are practically the masters of our own destiny; that we can, by counter suggestions, kill any of our prosperity or happiness enemies. It teaches us that there is no great power in the universe that sends misfortunes, but, on the contrary, that there is a great creative Power which holds us, shields us, and bestows on us all the bounty and prosperity, all the happiness and blessedness we open our minds to receive.

The coming man will not be fettered or held down by superstitions of any kind; he will have no fear, because he will have the knowledge which shows him that all fears are but ghosts, without entity—mere phantoms, creations of a disordered imagination, children of ignorance.

XV. SELF-CONTROL VS. THE
EXPLOSIVE PASSIONS

ROVE to me,” says Mrs. Oliphant, “that you can control yourself, and I’ll say you’re an educated man; and without this, all other education is good for next to nothing.”

No one can expect to accomplish anything very great when he is not king of himself.

The lack of self-control has ruined multitudes of men with high ambition, rare ability, and great education, men of immense promise in every way.

Every day the papers tell us of those who, in a fit of anger, have struck the fatal blow or fired the cruel shot that has cost them a friend and their own lives or liberty.

Ask the wretched victims in our state prisons and in our penitentiaries what a hot temper has cost them. How many of these unfortunates have lost their liberty for life through a fit of hot temper which may have lasted but a minute! The cruel shot was fired, the trigger was pulled in an instant, but the friend returned never, the crime could not be undone.

Oh, the tragedies that have been enacted when the blood was hot with anger!

Many a man has lost a good position, has sacrificed the opportunity of a lifetime in a fit of bad temper. He has thrown away in the anger of a moment, perhaps, the work and experience of years in climbing to his position.

I know a very able editor who has occupied splendid positions on the best and greatest dailies in the country. He is a forceful, vigorous, masterful writer on a great variety of subjects, a fine historian, and a warm, tender-hearted man, who will do anything for any one in need, and yet he is almost a total failure because of his explosive temper. He does not hesitate in the heat of a moment’s anger to walk out of a position which it has taken him years to get. This man is conscious of ability second to none, yet he has drifted from pillar to post, hardly able to support his family, and he must go through life conscious that he is the slave of a bad temper.

Everywhere we see victims of an uncontrolled temper tripping themselves up, losing in a few moments, perhaps, all they have gained in months, or maybe in a lifetime. They are continually climbing and dropping backward.

I know several old men whose whole careers have been crippled by their hot tempers. They could not refrain from giving people with whom they had differences “a piece of their mind.” No matter how adversely it affected their own interests, or what was at stake, they would let their tongues and tempers have full sway.

A pretty costly business, this, of giving another person “a piece of your mind” when your temper is up!

I know a very able business man who has practically ruined his reputation and his business by his passion for telling people what he thinks when he gets angry with them. When his temper is aroused there is nothing too mean or contemptible for him to say. He calls them all sorts of names. He raves without reason or sense. He drives his employees away from him. It is almost impossible for him to keep any one with any spirit or ability.

I have seen people in the grip of passion or anger act more like demons than human beings. I recall one man who, when possessed by one of these terrible fits of anger, would smash everything he could lay his hands on, and pour forth a volley of the vilest abuse upon any one who got in his way or attempted to restrain him. I have seen him almost kill animals in his rage by striking them with clubs or fence sticks. His eyes would glare like a madman’s and people who knew him would run for their lives. He was for the time a maniac and did not seem to have the slightest idea of what he was doing when this demon of anger had possession of him. After his passion storm had subsided, although a robust man, he would be completely exhausted for a long time.

A man in a fit of uncontrolled passion is really temporarily insane. He is under control of the demon in him. No man is sane when he cannot completely control his acts. While in that condition he is liable to do things which he would regret all the rest of his life. Many a man has been obliged to look back over a scarred discordant life, a life filled with unutterable mortifications and humiliations because of a hot temper, because he did not learn to control himself.

What writer, what artist could ever depict the havoc which the whole brood of evil passions—anger, jealousy, revenge, and hatred—have played in human lives. Just think of the effect on one’s character of harboring for many years the determination, the passion to get square with an imagined enemy, and of waiting for the opportunity to wreak vengeance upon some one.

Think how much a violent explosion of temper takes out of one’s entire system, mental and physical! Much more than many weeks of hard work when in a normal condition. And then picture, if you can, the terrible after suffering, the humiliation of it all, the remorse and chagrin, the loss of self-respect, the shock to one’s finer sensibilities, when one comes to himself and realizes what has happened!

A fit of anger may work greater damage to the body and character than a drunken bout. Hatred may leave worse scars upon a clean life than the bottle. Jealousy, envy, anger, uncontrolled grief may do more to wreck the physical life than many years of excessive smoking. Anxiety, fretting, and scolding may instil a more subtle poison into the system than the cigarette.

“Many a soul is in a bad condition to-day because of the fire of anger which recently burned there.”

There is no doubt that an uncontrolled temper shortens many lives. Some people fly into such a rage that they will tremble for hours afterwards and be wholly unfitted for business or work.

I have known a whole family completely to upset their physical conditions and make themselves ill by a violent quarrel. They would almost tear one another to pieces by their explosive passions. In a short time their faces were transformed. You could see the demons of passion fighting there. We all know that such quarrelling, as well as backbiting, twitting, denunciation, and criticism can produce but one result, and that it would be simply impossible for such causes to produce harmony.

How many people at the mercy of an uncontrolled passion have slain members of their own family or friends whom ten minutes before nothing could have induced them to harm! Naturally good people commit fiendish crimes when blinded by passion.

I know a woman who allows herself to be so swept away by a storm of rage that after it has subsided she is completely exhausted; for days she is as weak as a child and looks as though she had been through some terrible ordeal. A violent headache, or some other form of physical disturbance, invariably follows.

Physicians well know how violent fits of jealousy tear the nervous system to pieces so that the victim is often a complete wreck for a long time. I have seen a woman so transformed in a single year by the domination of this terrible demon in the mind that her friends scarcely knew her.

When jealousy once gets possession of a person it changes and colors the whole outlook upon life. Everything takes on the hue of this consuming passion. The reasoning faculties are paralyzed, and the victim is completely within the clutches of this thought fiend. Even the brain structure is changed by the harboring of this fearful mental foe.

Every little while we see accounts of people who have dropped dead in a fit of passion. The nervous shock of sudden and violent rage, no matter what the cause, is so great that it will sometimes stop the action of the heart, especially if that organ is weak. Violent paroxysms of anger have often produced apoplexy. A temper storm raging through the brain develops rank poison and leaves all sorts of devastation behind.

We often suffer tortures from the humiliation and loss of self-respect we bring upon ourselves by indulgence in fits of anger, in jealousy, hatred, or revenge; but we do not realize the permanent damage, the irreparable injury, we inflict upon our entire physical and mental being.

An uncontrolled passion in the mind actually changes the chemical composition of the various secretions of the body, developing deadly poisons. Because the mental forces are silent, we do not realize how tremendously powerful they are. We have been so accustomed to think of disease and all forms of physical ills as the result of some derangement in the body, and have associated their cure with drugs or other remedies, that it is difficult for us to look upon them as caused by mental disturbances or discords.

It is well known that a violent fit of temper affects the heart instantly, and psychophysicists have discovered the presence of poison in the blood immediately after the mental storm has passed. This explains why we feel so depressed, so exhausted and nervous after all storms of passion, fear, worry, jealousy, or revenge have swept through the mind. It is because of the mental poison and other harmful secretions they have left in the brain and blood.

There is no constitution so strong but it will ultimately succumb to the constant racking and twisting of the nerve centres caused by an uncontrolled temper. Every time you become angry you reverse all of the normal, mental, and physical processes. Everything in you rebels against passion storms; every mental faculty protests against their abuse.

If people only realized what havoc indulgence in hot temper plays in their delicate nervous structure, if they could only see with the physical eyes the damage done, as they can see what follows in the wake of a tornado, they would not dare to get angry.

The poison generated by angry passions circulating in the blood, affects the centres of life throughout the whole body. The delicate cells of the brain and nerves and all of the internal organs, are deteriorated by the poison-vitiated blood.

One reason why so many people either have poor or indifferent health is because the cell life is continually starved and dwarfed by vitiated blood. No one can have abundant, abounding life, a superb vitality; can reach his greatest efficiency, when this mental poisoning process is constantly going on in his system.

Nothing else racks and wrenches the delicate nervous system more than fits of uncontrolled temper, jealousy, or raging passion of any sort. The brain and nervous mechanism were intended to run quietly, smoothly, harmoniously, and when so run they are capable of an enormous output in good work and happiness. But, like a delicate piece of material machinery, when overspeeded or not properly oiled, or when run without a balance wheel to steady their motion, they will very quickly shake themselves to pieces.

The man who scolds and frets and fumes and lets his temper get the better of him, little realizes what havoc his humor is playing inside of him, or how he is breaking down his health and shortening his life.

There is something wrong in the education, the training of the man who cannot control himself, who has to confess that he is a man part of the time only, that the rest of the time he is a brute; that often the beast in him is loose and runs riot in his mental kingdom and does what it will until he can get control of himself again.

Zopyrus, the physiognomist, said: “Socrates’ features showed that he was stupid, brutal, sensual, and addicted to drunkenness.” Socrates upheld the analysis by saying: “By nature I am addicted to all these sins, and they were only restrained and vanquished by the continual practice of virtue.”

The Creator has implanted in every man a divine power that is more than a match for his worst passion, for his most vicious trait. If he will only develop and use this power he need not be the slave of any vice.

Shakespeare says: “Assume a virtue if you have it not.”

Emerson also says, in effect: “The virtue you would like to have, assume it as already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in the character of the part he plays.” No matter how great your weakness or how much you may regret it, assume steadily and persistently its opposite until you acquire the habit of holding that thought, or of living the thing, not in its weakness, but in its wholeness, in its entirety. Hold the ideal of an efficient faculty or quality, not of a marred or deficient one. The way to reach or to attain to anything is to bend oneself toward it with all one’s might, and we approximate it just in proportion to the intensity and the persistency of our effort to attain it.

If you are inclined to storm and rage, or if you “fly all to pieces” over the least annoyance, do not waste your time regretting this weakness, and telling everybody that you cannot help it. Just assume the calm, deliberate, quiet, balanced composure which characterizes your ideal person in that respect. Persuade yourself that you are not hot-tempered, nervous, or excitable, that you can control yourself; that you are well balanced; that you do not fly off at a tangent at every little annoyance. You will be amazed to see how the perpetual holding of this serene, calm, quiet attitude will help you to become like your thought. No matter what comes up, no matter how annoying, or exasperating things may be, or how excited or disturbed other people around you may be, you will not be thrown off your centre. All we are or ever have been or ever will be comes from the quality and force of our thinking.

A bad temper is largely the result of false pride, selfishness, and cheap vanity, and no man who is worthy the name will continue to be governed by it. There is nothing manly or noble in the quality which lets loose the “dogs of war,” which in an instant may make enemies of our best friends.

We all know how hard it is to control our feelings and our words when the blood flows hot through the frenzied brain, but we also know how dangerous, how fatal it is to become slaves to temper. It not only ruins the disposition and cripples efficiency, but it is also very humiliating; for a man who cannot control his own acts has to acknowledge that he is not his own master.

It is dangerous for you even for a few minutes to get down off the throne of your reason and let the beast in you reign. Many a person has become permanently insane by the growth of the habit of losing his temper.

Think of a man who was intended to be absolutely master of all the forces of the universe, stepping down off the throne of his reason and admitting that he is not a man for the time being, confessing his inability to control his own acts, allowing himself to do the mean and low things, to say the cruel words that hurt and sting, to throw the hot javelin of sarcasm into the mind of a perfectly innocent person! Think of that madness which makes a man strike down his best friend, or cut him to the quick with the cruel word!

Anger is temporary insanity. A man must be insane when he is in the clutches of a demon that has no regard for life or reputation, a demon which would bid him kill his best friend without an instant’s hesitation.

The child learns by experience to avoid touching hot things that will burn him, sharp things that will cut him; but many of us adults never learn to avoid the hot temper which sears and gives us such intense suffering, sometimes for days and weeks.

The man who has learned the secret of right thinking and self-control knows just as well how to protect himself from his mental enemies as his physical ones. He knows that when the brain is on fire with passion, it will not do to add more fuel by storming and raging, but will quietly apply an antidote which will put out the fire—the serenity thought, the thought of peace, quiet, and harmony. The opposite thought will very quickly antidote the flames. When a neighbor’s house is on fire, we do not run with an oil-can to put out the flames; we do not throw on kerosene, but an antidote. Yet when a child is on fire with passion we have been in the habit of trying to put out the fire by adding fuel to it. What misery, what crime, what untold suffering might be prevented by training children to self-control, by directing their thought into proper channels!

If we see a person who is mired in a swamp and desperately struggling to extricate himself, we run to his rescue without hesitation. We would not think of adding to his distress or danger by pushing him in deeper. But somehow when a person is angered, instead of trying to put out the fire of his passion, we only add fuel to the flames. Yet people who have bad tempers are often grateful to those who will help them to do what they are not able to do themselves, to control them and prevent them from saying and doing that which will give them much chagrin afterward.

When next you see a person whose inflammable passion is just ready to explode, and you know that he is doing his best to hold himself down, why not help him, instead of throwing on more inflammable material and starting the conflagration?

By doing this, you will not only render him a great service, but you will also strengthen your own power of self-control. The man who cannot control himself is like a mariner without a compass—he is at the mercy of every wind that blows. Every storm of passion, every wave of irresponsible thought buffets him hither and thither, drives him out of his course, and makes it wellnigh impossible for him to reach the goal of his desires.

Self-control is the very essence of character. To be able to look a man straight in the eye, calmly and deliberately, without the slightest ruffle of temper under extreme provocation, gives a sense of power which nothing else can give. To feel that you are always, not sometimes, master of yourself gives a dignity and strength to character, buttresses it, supports it on every side, as nothing else can. This is the culmination of thought mastery.

XVI. GOOD CHEER—GOD’S
MEDICINE

 WOMAN in California, who, because of crushing sorrow, had fallen a victim to despondency, insomnia, and kindred ills, determined to throw off the gloom which was making life so heavy a burden to her, and established a rule that she would laugh at least three times a day, whether occasion presented or not. Accordingly, she trained herself to laugh heartily at the least provocation, and would retire to her room and make merry by herself. She was soon in excellent health and buoyant spirits, and her home became a sunny, cheerful abode.

If people only knew the medicinal power of laughter, of good cheer, of the constant unrepressed expression of joy and gladness, half the physicians would be out of work.

Did not Lycurgus set up the god of laughter in the Spartan eating-halls because he thought there was no sauce like laughter at meals?

Laughter is undoubtedly one of Nature’s greatest tonics. It brings the disordered faculties and functions into harmony; it lubricates the mental bearings and prevents the friction which monotonous, exacting business engenders. It is a divine gift bestowed upon us as a life-preserver, a health-promoter, a joy-generator, a success-maker.

Laughter, like an air cushion, eases you over the jolts and the hard places on life’s highway. Laughter is always healthy. It tends to bring every abnormal condition back to the normal. It is a panacea for heartaches, for life’s bruises. It is a life prolonger. People who keep themselves in physical and mental harmony through hearty laughter are likely to live longer than those who take life too seriously.

In order to become normal, the natural fun-loving forces within us must be released. Laughter is one form of exercise which sets them free, rescues men from the “blues.”

Somewhere I have read of a man whose “laughing muscles” were so paralyzed that his laughter sounded like a voice from the tombs. American life is so serious that many men lose their power to laugh. They can force a little sepulchral chuckle, but the genuine side-shaking laughter is almost a stranger to their experience. They are in such a serious chase after the dollar, their life is so strenuous, so given to scheming and planning, that they do not have much time to laugh. They do not know the medicinal value there is in the habit of laughter, how it clears the cobwebs out of the brain, disposes of the fangs of worry and anxiety and business pressure, takes the mind off the grind of things, removes friction, and helps to make life worth while.

To people who have lost the laughing habit I would say: Lock yourself in your room and practise smiling. Smile at your pictures, furniture, looking-glass, anything, just so the stiff muscles are brought into play again.

In a corner of his desk Lincoln kept a copy of the latest humorous work, and it was his habit when fatigued, annoyed, or depressed, to take this up and read a chapter for relief. Humor, whether clean, sensible wit or sheer nonsense—whatever provokes mirth and makes a man jollier—is a gift from heaven.

Laughter is a very important element in a successful career. Many a man who could have been a success sleeps in a failure’s grave to-day because he took life too seriously. He poisoned the atmosphere about him, so that it became unhealthy, and paralyzed his own powers.

We often hear people, especially delicate women who have nervous dyspepsia, say they do not understand how it is that they can go out to late suppers or banquets and eat heartily all sorts of incongruous food without feeling any inconvenience afterward.

They do not realize that it is due to the change in the mental attitude. They have had a good time; they have enjoyed themselves. The lively conversation, the jokes which caused them to laugh heartily, the bright, cheerful environment, completely changed their mental attitude, and of course these conditions were reflected in the digestion and every other part of the system, for laughter and good cheer are enemies of dyspepsia. Anything which will divert the dyspeptic’s mind from his ailments will improve his digestion. When they were at home worrying over their health, swallowing a little dyspepsia with every mouthful of food, of course these women could not assimilate what they ate. But when they were having a jolly good time they forgot their ailments, and were surprised afterward to find that they had enjoyed their food and that it did not hurt them. The whole process is mental.

Use the laugh-cure—the fun-cure—in the home. Throw away the drugs and save doctors’ bills.

“The power of cheerfulness to do good,” says Dr. Sanderson, “. . . is not an artificial stimulus of the tissues, to be followed by reaction and greater waste, as is the case with many drugs; but the effect of cheerfulness is an actual life-giving influence throughout a normal channel, the results of which reach every part of the system. It brightens the eye, makes ruddy the countenance, brings elasticity to the step, and promotes all the inner force by which life is sustained. The blood circulates more freely, the oxygen comes to its home in the tissues, health is promoted and disease is banished.”

There is no drug which can compete with cheerfulness. A jolly, whole-hearted, sunny physician is worth more than all the remedies in an apothecary shop. What magic we often see wrought by the arrival of the physician, especially when the patient is frightened and nervous. Discouragement, the hopeless expression, are driven away by his reassuring, confident smile, and many times even severe pain is relieved by his mental uplift and encouragement.

How eagerly the patient watches the doctor’s face for a ray of hope. No drug could work such magic as does that one encouraging look.

A friend remembers how, as a boy, when the old family physician used to come to the home so full of life and joy and gladness, with sunshine beaming from every pore, members of the family would feel absolutely ashamed to be sick, ashamed to think that God’s work, which was made perfect, should need patching up.

“The whole atmosphere of the house,” he said, “seemed to change the minute the doctor entered. His hearty laugh, ringing through the rooms, as he rubbed his hands before the fire on a cold winter day, and his mere presence, did us more good than pills or potions. Somehow, the very thought of his coming after we had sent for him seemed to drive away our troubles.”

One of the most successful physicians in Boston gives very little medicine. His merry face and cheerful disposition take the sting out of pain. He replaces despair with hope, discouragement with confidence and a cheerful reassurance, so that the sick feel a decided uplift in his presence and are filled with a stronger determination to get well.

Too many of us dry up and become stale, uninteresting, and abnormal from lack of the development of the cheerful habit. There is no one thing which will do so much for the life, for health, for happiness, as the cultivation of the cheerful habit, the habit of flinging out one’s joy and gladness everywhere, radiating good cheer.

The constantly increasing success of the vaudeville playhouses and other places of amusement all over this country shows the tremendous demand in the human economy for fun. Most people do not appreciate that this demand must be met in some form or the character will be warped and defective.

What a complete revolution in your whole physical and mental being takes place after seeing a really funny play! You went to the play tired, jaded, worn out, discouraged. All your mental faculties were clogged with brain ash; you could not think clearly. When you came home you were a new being.

A business man, on returning home after a perplexing, exasperating, exhausting day’s work, may experience the same thing. Romping and playing with the children, spending a jolly evening with his family or friends, telling stories and cracking jokes, rest his jaded nerves and restore him to his normal condition.

I have been as much refreshed by a good, hearty laugh, by listening to wholesome stories and jokes, by spending an evening with friends and having a good time, as by a long, sound night’s sleep; and I look back upon such experiences as little vacations.

Anything that will make a man new, that will clear the cobwebs of discouragement from his brain and drive away fear, care, and worry, is of practical value.

We should not look upon fun and humor as transitory things, but as solid, lasting, permanent medicinal influences on the whole character.

Why should not having a good time form a part of our daily programme? Why should not this enter into our great life-plan? Why should we be serious and gloomy because we have to work for a living?

There is a moral as well as healing influence in things which amuse and make us enjoy life. No one was ever spoiled by good humor, but tens of thousands have been made better by it. Fun is a food as necessary to the wholeness of man as bread.

Who can estimate the good our great humorists have done the world in helping to drive away care and sorrow, in lightening burdens, in taking drudgery out of dreary occupations, in cheering the discouraged and the lonely?

A writer known for his cheerful sayings received a letter from a lady, stating that one of his humorous poems had saved her life.

Any one who has brought relief to distressed souls, who has lifted the burden from saddened, sorrowing hearts, has done as much good as any of those who have been civilization builders.

Few of us really understand the full value of good cheer and laughter as physiological and psychological factors. An eminent French surgeon says that we ought to train children to habits of mirth.

“Encourage your child to be merry and laugh aloud,” he says. “A good hearty laugh expands the chest and makes the blood bound merrily along. Commend me to a good laugh—not to a little snickering laugh, but to one that will sound right through the house.”

We realize that it is very necessary to train the mind in business principles; to train certain faculties to do special things, but do not seem to think it necessary to cultivate the habit of cheerfulness. Yet not even an education is as necessary to the child as the formation of the cheerful habit. This ought to be regarded as the first essential of the preparation for life—the training of the mind toward sunshine; the developing of every possibility of the cheerful faculties.

The first duty we owe a child is to teach it to fling out its inborn gladness and joy with the same freedom and abandon as the bobolink does when it makes the meadow joyous with its song. Suppression of the fun-loving nature of a child means the suppression of its mental and moral faculties. Joy will go out of the heart of a child after a while if it is continually suppressed. Mothers who are constantly cautioning the little ones not to do this or not to do that, telling them not to laugh or make a noise, until they lose their naturalness and become little old men and women, do not realize the harm they are doing.

An eminent writer says: “Children without hilarity will never amount to much. Trees without blossoms will never bear fruit.”

There is an irrepressible longing for amusement, for rollicking fun, in young people, and if these longings were more fully met in the home it would not be so difficult to keep the boy and girl under the parental roof. I always think there is something wrong when the father or the children are so very uneasy to get out of the house at night and to go off “somewhere” where they will have a good time. A happy, joyous home is a powerful magnet to child and man. The sacred memory of it has kept many a person from losing his self-respect, and from the commission of crime.

Fun is the cheapest and best medicine in the world for your children as well as for yourself. Give it to them in good large doses. It will not only save you doctors’ bills, but it will also help to make your children happier, and will improve their chances in life. We should not need half so many prisons, insane asylums, and almshouses if all children had a happy childhood.

The very fact that the instinct to play—the love of fun—is so imperious in the child, shows a great necessity in its nature which if suppressed will leave a famine in its life.

A sunny, joyous, happy childhood is to the individual what a rich soil and genial sun are to the young plant. If the early conditions are not favorable, the plant becomes starved and stunted and the results cannot be corrected in the later trees. It is now or never with the plant. This is true with the human plant. A starved, suppressed, stunted childhood makes a dwarfed man. A joyful, happy, fun-loving environment develops powers, resources, and possibilities which would remain dormant in a cold, dull, repressing environment.

How many lives are blank, dry, as uninteresting as a desert because cheerfulness was crushed out of the child life; because the joys of childhood were never developed. Their young lives were suppressed and all that was sweet and juicy crushed out of them in their early years.

Everywhere we see men and women discontented and unhappy because of the lack of play in their early life. When the young clay finally hardened it was unable to respond to a joyful environment.

Happy recreation has a very subtle influence upon the mental faculties, which are emphasized and heightened by it. How our courage is strengthened, our determination, our ambition, our whole outlook on life changed by it. There seems to be a subtle fluid from humor and fun which penetrates the entire being, bathes all the mental faculties, and washes out the brain ash and débris from exhausted cerebrum and muscles. We have all experienced the transforming, refreshing, rejuvenating power of good, wholesome fun.

Many people make anything like joy or happiness impossible by dwelling upon the disagreeable, the unfortunate, unlucky things of life. They always see the ugly, the crooked, the wrong side of things.

I once lived in a clergyman’s family where I scarcely heard a person laugh in months. It seemed to be a part of the inmates’ religion to wear long faces and to be sober-minded and solemn. They did not have much use for this world; they seemed to be living for the world to come; and whenever the minister heard me laugh, he would remind me that I had better be thinking of my “latter end,” and preparing for the death which might come at any moment. Laughter was considered frivolous and worldly; and as for playing in the house—it would not be tolerated for an instant.

Melancholy, solemnity used to be regarded as a sign of spirituality, but it is now looked upon as the imprint of a morbid mind. There is no religion in it. True religion is full of hope, sunshine, optimism, and cheerfulness. It is joyous and glad and beautiful. There is no Christianity in the ugly, the discordant, the sad. The religion which Christ taught was bright and beautiful. The sunshine, the “lilies of the field,” the “birds of the air,” the hills, the valleys, the trees, the mountains, the brooks—all things beautiful—were in His teaching. There was no cold, dry theology in it. It was just happy Christianity!

Cheerfulness is one of the great miracle-workers of the world. It reënforces the whole man, doubles and trebles his power, and gives new meaning to his life. No man is a failure until he has lost his cheerfulness, his optimistic outlook. The man who does his best and carries a smiling face and keeps cheerful in the midst of discouragements, when things go wrong and the way is dark and doubtful, is sure to win.

“Laugh until I come back,” was a noted clergyman’s “good-by” salutation. It is a good one for us all.

XVII. THE SUN-DIAL’S MOTTO

N a famous sun-dial it is written: “I record none but hours of sunshine.” Every human life would be beautified by making this a life motto.

What a great thing it would be if we could only learn to wipe out of our memories forever everything unpleasant, everything which brings up bitter memories and unfortunate associations and depressing, discouraging suggestions! If we could only keep the mind filled with beautiful thoughts which uplift and encourage, the efficiency of our lives would be multiplied.

Are not some people so unfortunately constituted that they are unable to remember pleasant, agreeable things? When you meet them they always have some sad story to tell, something that has happened to them or is surely going to happen. They tell you about the accidents, narrow escapes, losses, and afflictions they have had. The bright days and happy experiences they seldom mention. They recall the disagreeable, the ugly, the discordant. The rainy days make such an impression upon their minds that they seem to think it rains about all of the time.

There are others who do just the reverse. They always talk of the pleasant things, good times, and agreeable experiences of their lives. I know some of these people who have had all sorts of misfortunes, losses, sorrows, and yet they so seldom speak of them or refer to them, that you would think they never had had anything in their lives but good fortune, that they had never had any enemies, that everybody had been kind to them. These are the people who attract us, the people we love.

The habit of turning one’s sunny side toward others is a result of the practice of holding charitable, loving, cheerful thoughts perpetually in the mind; while the gloomy, sarcastic, mean character is formed by harboring hard, uncharitable, unkind thoughts until the brain becomes set toward the dark, so that the life can only radiate gloom.

Some people’s minds are like a junk shop; they contain things of considerable value mixed with a great deal of rubbish. There is no system or order in them. These minds retain everything—good, bad, or indifferent. They can never bear to throw anything away, for fear it might be of service at some time, so that their mental storehouses are clogged with all sorts of rubbish. If these people would only have a regular house-cleaning and throw away all the rubbish, everything of a doubtful value, and systematize and arrange what is left, they might amount to something; but no one can do good work with his mind full of discord and confusion.

Get rid of the mental rubbish. Do not go through life burdened with non-essential, meaningless things. Everywhere we see people who are handicapped, doing everything to a great disadvantage, because they never will let go of anything. They are like the over-careful housekeeper, who never throws anything away, for fear it may be of use in the future, and whose attic and woodshed, and every closet and corner in the house, are piled up with rubbish which “might be wanted some time.” The practice of throwing away rubbish of all kinds is of inestimable value.

Occasionally we come across minds that are like public cabs. Now you see in them a good-looking man or woman—a beautiful character; a little later a drunkard or vicious woman. In other words, the cabman picks up the first customer he finds, not caring whether he is good or bad. So this order of mind picks up all sorts of ideas, good, bad, and indifferent, without selection or choice. It is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that comes near it. It is impossible for such a mind to be clean, pure, free from enemy thoughts, conflicting thought currents, inharmonious vibrations or demoralizing influences.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the finest character is the ability to order his mind and to exclude from it all the enemy thoughts—thoughts that bring friction and discord into the life, thoughts that depress, that stunt, that darken.

No mind can do good work when clouded with unhappy or vicious thoughts. The mental sky must be clear or there can be no enthusiasm, no brightness, clearness, or efficiency in our mental work.

If you would do the maximum of which you are capable, keep the mind filled with sunshine, with beauty and truth, with cheerful, uplifting thoughts. Bury everything that makes you unhappy and discordant, everything that cramps your freedom, that worries you, before it buries you.

The mental temple was not given us for the storing of low, base, mean things. It was intended for the abode of the gods, for the treasuring of high purposes, grand aims, noble aspirations.

It is a shame, and will some time be looked upon as a disgrace, for a human being bearing the stamp of divinity to be dominated by base, unworthy, demoralizing thoughts. The time will come when one will be as much ashamed of harboring a disagreeable, discordant, contaminating thought as he would feel if he were caught stealing. When a man once gets a true perception of himself, of his grandeur and dignity, and infinite possibilities, he will not allow himself to be dominated by the mental enemies which now dog him from the cradle to the grave.

Man was not made to express discord, but harmony; to express beauty, truth, love, and happiness; wholeness, not halfness; completeness, not incompleteness.

No one has learned the art of true living until he has trained his mind to forget every experience from which he can no longer derive any advantage—that will hinder his progress and make him unhappy. No matter how great a mistake you have made, it should be forgotten, buried forever. Don’t keep digging it up. You have learned the lesson there is in it for you. The only good use you can make of an unfortunate mistake is to make it a starting-point for something better.

What is there to be gained by harboring injuries, by dwelling upon misfortunes, by morbid worrying over our failures? Did it ever pay to harbor slights and imagined insults?

There is only one thing to do with a disagreeable thought or experience, and that is, get rid of it; hurl it out of your mind as you would a thief out of your house. You cannot afford to give shelter to enemies of your peace and comfort.

If you have hard feelings, unkindly thoughts toward others, if you are trying to “get square” with some one who has injured you, or if you are suffering from jealousy, envy, or hatred, dispel these killing emotions, these discordant feelings, as vicious enemies. Say to yourself: “This is not manly, this is not friendly, this is not humane; these are the thoughts for the base, degraded; they are not the sort of thoughts for one who is trying to stand for something in the world.”

So long as you harbor the hatred thought, the jealous thought, the revenge, worry, anxiety, or fear thought, you must suffer—just as a pedestrian with gravel in his shoes must suffer until he removes it.

We cannot harbor any grudge, any hatred against another without suffering a frightful loss in our own nature. It coarsens, animalizes, brutalizes us. On the other hand, the holding of the kindly feeling, the love thought, the helpful, charitable, magnanimous thought, ennobles the life, beautifies the character, enriches the nature. Our mental attitude gives its color to the life. What it is, we are like toward others. If that is hateful, we are hateful; if that is revengeful, we have a revengeful disposition. We are like our ideals. I have never known a really good person who had a mean, contemptible estimate of other people, or who was always criticising them, questioning their motives, imputing to them low, selfish motives.

Do not go about nursing some fancied wrong or insult or grudge against somebody, cherishing unkind feelings toward any one. Such thoughts poison the brain. They sting and corrupt. Bitterness in the heart is like a leaven, which works its way through the entire system. The constant dwelling upon bitter things saps your vitality and lessens your ability to do something worth while. These are enemies of your youthfulness, of your happiness and success. You cannot afford to have them festering in your heart and tormenting your mind.

Do not remember anything disagreeable which can cripple your efficiency or mar your work. Just wipe it out of your memory, no matter how much it may hurt your pride to do so. Your great aim should be progress, and you cannot afford to have a lot of rubbish clinging to you which keeps you back or hinders your speed in your life race. You need all your energy, every ounce of power you possess, for the race. Husband your strength for the main issue. Make every ounce of force tell.

Make up your mind to be large, generous, and charitable, to forget slights or injuries, not to harbor malice, but to remember that most people are kind at heart and would not intentionally slight or injure you. Show your charitable side to every one. Be cheerful, kind, and helpful, no matter what others may do to you or say about you. Learn always to put a charitable interpretation upon people’s motives and you will be surprised at the effect of your attitude, not only upon yourself, but also upon those with whom you are associated. The kindly, helpful, sympathetic thought held toward your enemies will work like a leaven in their characters and change them for the better a thousand times quicker than seeking revenge or trying to get even with them.

The man who radiates good cheer to everybody, who says kind things about people, who sees in his fellow-man the man God made, the immortal, perfect man—not the sin-racked, the vice-scarred man—is the one we love and admire.

Why should we remember the unkind things people say of us? If we practised the art of forgetting these things we should learn to love where we once hated, to admire where we despised, to help where we hindered, to praise where we criticised.

The good excludes the bad; the higher always shuts out the lower; the greater motive, the grander affection excludes the lesser, the lower. The good is more than a match for the bad.

A woman who has had great sorrows and afflictions says: “I made the resolution that I would never sadden any one with my troubles. I have laughed and told jokes when I could have wept. I have smiled in the face of every misfortune. I have tried to let every one go away from my presence with a happy word and bright thought to carry with them. Happiness makes happiness, and I myself am happier than I would have been had I sat down and bemoaned my fate.”

When you were in the dumps, “blue” and discouraged, worried and almost ready to give up the struggle for the thing you were trying to reach, did you never meet some sunny, jovial, humorous character, through whose influence it seemed that the whole world was changed in a few minutes—the whole atmosphere cleared of bogies and haunting skeletons—and you caught the contagion of the humor and good cheer, and were another person? This was due only to your change of thought, the new suggestions held in your mind. It was only a question of the expulsive power of a stronger motive, affection, or idea. If we only knew the philosophy of this expulsive power of a stronger, higher motive to drive out the weaker or the lower, we could quickly clear the mental atmosphere of all the clouds of doubt and despair, of all worry and anxiety and uncertainty by substituting their opposites.

If we did not harbor in the mind the things that are not good for us, they would not make such a lasting impression upon us. In fact, they would not get hold of us. It is the harboring of them, turning them over and over, thinking of them, that intrenches them in the mind.

The way to get rid of error is to keep the mind full of truth; the way to get rid of discord is to keep saturated with harmony, the love thought.

Harmony is the reality, the entity, the creative force. The time will come when the child will be taught from the outset how to protect himself from insidious enemies of mind and body, how to keep himself in harmony by always living in the light of hope and truth, where ghosts and hideous shadows cannot live. He will be trained in the knowledge that truth and beauty, joy and gladness, harmony, good-will thoughts, health thoughts, will kill their opposites; that they have the same effect upon them that water has upon fire.

XVIII. “AS YE SOW”

S it not a strange fact that while men know with absolute certainty that what they sow or plant in the soil will come back to them in exact kind, that it is absolutely impossible to sow corn and get a crop of wheat, they entirely disregard this law when it comes to mental sowing?

On what principle can we expect a crop of happiness and contentment when for years we have been sowing seed thoughts of exactly the opposite character? How can we expect a crop of health when we are all the time sowing disease thought seeds?

We would think a farmer insane who should sow thistle seeds all over his farm and expect to reap wheat. But we sow fear thoughts, worry thoughts, anxious thoughts, doubt thoughts, and wonder that we are not in perpetual harmony.

The harvest from our thoughts is just as much the result of law as that of the farmer’s sowing. Seed corn can only produce corn. A man’s achievement is the harvest, big or little, beautiful or blighted, abundant or scarce, according to the character of the thoughts he has sown.

A man who sows failure thoughts can no more reap a success harvest than the farmer can get a wheat crop from thistles. If he sows optimistic seed, the harmony, health, purity, truth thoughts, the thoughts of abundance and prosperity, of confidence and assurance, he will reap a corresponding harvest; but if he sows discord he will reap discordant conditions.

Harmony is power; discord is weakness. Pessimistic thoughts are thistles which check the good products and ruin the harvest.

How simple our great life problems would become if we could only realize that the mental laws are just as scientific as the physical laws! Every thought generated in the brain is a seed which must produce its harvest—thistle or rose, weed or wheat.

Our careers are the harvests of our mental sowing. If we sow the wind we shall reap the whirlwind.

If we sow the thoughts of abundance, of plenty, we shall reap accordingly; but if we sow the mean, pinched, stingy failure thought we shall reap a poverty harvest. In other words, the life harvest must follow the thought. When we see a selfish, repulsive face, we know that it is the harvest of selfish, vicious sowing. On the other hand, when we see a calm inspiring face, we know that it has come from the sowing of harmonious, helpful thought seeds.

If there is any one law of the universe emphasized over and above all others, it is that like produces like everywhere and always.

A person who should take a knife and begin to slash his flesh until the blood flowed would be shut up in an insane asylum; but we are all the time slashing our mental selves with the edged thought-tools—hatred, revenge, anger, jealousy—and yet we think ourselves sane, normal.

Every thought is a seed which produces a mental plant exactly like itself. If there is venom in the seed thought-plant there will be venom in the fruit which will poison the life, which will destroy happiness and efficiency.

If you sell yourself to your desires, you must expect the harvest to correspond. A man who sells himself to a selfish life, a life of getting and never giving, must not complain if there are thistles and thorns in his harvest. Life is just to us. It gives us what we pay for. The truth is, many of us ask for things without being willing to pay the price, and, of course, we receive only as we pay, for Nature keeps a cash store. She gives us everything we pay for; we take away nothing without leaving the price.

The coming man will know that if he wants to produce a crop of prosperity he must not sow failure or poverty seeds, seeds of discouragement or doubt. He will sow the seed that will produce the crop he wants. If he wants to produce a character-crop of beauty, sweetness, and loveliness, he will sow the seeds of kindness, love, and helpfulness; and he will know that if he sows seeds of hatred, jealousy, bitterness, and revenge he will get the same kind of a crop—hideous, noxious weeds.

The coming man will live scientifically. He will know that there is only one way to produce physical harmony, vigor, strength; that is, by sowing thought-seeds which are akin to the health crop he seeks. He will be just as certain of the character of his thought-crop as the farmer is certain that his harvest will correspond with his seed.

The body is simply a reflection of the mind; it cannot be anything else. It would be impossible for a person to hold only beautiful, loving thoughts in the mind and not have the body correspond and come into harmony with the habitual thinking. It is only a question of time. There is no guess-work about the processes. There is an absolutely inexorable law: Like must produce like.

It is impossible for a thief to injure the person he steals from half so much as he injures himself. He inconveniences his victim, but stabs himself with a venomous weapon. We are so constituted that it is impossible to injure another willingly without injury to ourselves. If we would be good to ourselves we must be good to others also. We cannot possibly strike our neighbor without receiving the blow ourselves. This is the new philosophy which Christ taught. Before his day it was “An eye for an eye,” an unkindness for an unkindness, a thrust for a thrust, a blow for a blow; but he taught that we must not strike back. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” This is as scientific as the laws of chemistry or mathematics.

The coming man will find that indulgence in retaliation for real or fancied injury, indulgence in hatred or revenge, will only rob him of power and mar his own achievement.

The infant puts his hand in the flame or on the hot stove until the pain teaches him better. After we have tortured ourselves with thoughts which tear and lacerate us, after we have had experience enough of this kind, we shall learn that it is too expensive a business, that we cannot afford to pay such a price for the sake of “getting square” with another. Self-protection will keep us from it when we know enough.

We may complain of our condition to-day, but we are simply reaping what we sowed yesterday. There is no dodging this reaping. The only way to get a different harvest to-morrow is to sow differently to-day. Everything we do every thought that passes through our mind, is a seed which we throw out into the soil, the world, and which must give a harvest like itself. Many people complain because their harvest is so full of thorns, thistles, and weeds; but if they analyzed their lives they would find that they had been sowing seeds of selfishness, jealousy, and envy. If they had sown seeds of unselfishness, kindness, happiness, and love, they would have had a very different kind of harvest.

The time will come when an intelligent person will no more think of indulging a cruel, envious, jealous thought toward another than he would put his hand into the flames.

The future man will not lacerate himself with vicious thoughts. He will not stab himself with jealousy or hatred thoughts, with fear or sick thoughts, because, like the child who will not put his hand in the fire after he has learned that it burns, he will want to avoid the pain they cause.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Peace, Power, and Plenty by Orison Swett Marden]