THE VICTORIOUS
ATTITUDE
BY
ORISON SWETT MARDEN

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

To think you can, creates the force that can.

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1916
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
Sixteenth Thousand

TO
MY FRIEND
CHARLES M. SCHWAB

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE

CHAPTER I
THE VICTORIOUS ATTITUDE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II
"ACCORDING TO THY FAITH"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III
DOUBT THE TRAITOR

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

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

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

He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.

James Allen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV
MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE

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

"You will be what you will to be;
Let failure find its false content
In that poor world 'environment,'
But spirit scorns it, and is free.
. . . . . . .
"The human Will, that force unseen,
The offspring of a deathless Soul,
Can hew a way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V
A NEW ROSARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI
ATTRACTING THE POORHOUSE

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

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

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

Poverty is a mental disease.