If it is impurity, say, "I was not made to be dominated by such a monstrous vice. G.o.d"s image in me was not intended to wallow in this filth. I have suffered long enough from this d.a.m.nable 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion. 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 appet.i.te 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. G.o.d and one make a majority. I am in the majority NOW."
_There is no inferiority or depravity about the man G.o.d made._ No matter how low you may have fallen, the G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d in him which when called will instantly rush to his aid.
If you feel that you have wandered very far from your G.o.d, that you had gotten out of the current which runs Heavenward, just repeat to yourself such things as this, "Nearer My G.o.d 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 G.o.dward current you are "nearer to G.o.d," 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, "G.o.d is my helper. G.o.d is my supply, I cannot want. G.o.d 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 G.o.d and we are powerful, victorious and happy just in proportion as we realize our oneness with Him, and weak, abject and miserable just in the degree we separate ourselves from Him, the All-Source, the All-Supply.
CHAPTER VI
ATTRACTING THE POORHOUSE
As long as you hold the poorhouse thought you are heading toward the poorhouse. A pinched, stingy thought means a pinched, stingy reply.
No matter how hard one may work, if he constantly holds the poverty ideal, the poorhouse thought in his mind, he is driving away the very thing he is pursuing.
The man who sows failure thoughts, poverty thoughts, can no more reap success, prosperity harvests, than a farmer can get a wheat crop from sowing thistles.
Poverty is a mental disease.
Some one has said that no one ever went to the poorhouse who did not attract the poorhouse by his poorhouse mental att.i.tude. Observation and long study of the question have convinced me that, as a rule, people who make miserable failures of their lives expected to do so. They had such a horror of the poorhouse, they lived in such terror of coming to want, that they shut off the very source of their supply. They had so warped their minds that they could see nothing ahead but poverty. They wasted the precious energy which might have been utilized in happiness and prosperity building, in expecting, dreading and preparing for the dire things that might come upon them, and, according to the law, they got what they dreaded and feared.
Thinking war, talking war, antic.i.p.ating it, getting ready for it, in other words, preparedness for war, the perpetual war suggestion, was largely responsible for the outbreak of the greatest war in history. If all the nations involved had talked peace, thought peace, expected it, prepared for it, there would have been peace, not war.
So long as people talk poverty, think poverty, expect it, get ready for it, they will have poverty. Preparedness for poverty, expecting it, attracts it, confirms poverty conditions.
We are constantly drawing to ourselves that which we expect. If you are sending out a perpetual poverty thought current, a doubt current, a discouragement current, no matter how hard you may be working in the opposite direction, you will never get away from the current you set in motion. The sort of thought current you generate will flow back to you.
Everywhere we see people trying hard to get on, struggling early and late to better their condition, and yet never expecting, or even hoping to be prosperous. They do not believe they are going to get what they are working for, and they do not.
A typical example of those who keep themselves in the poverty current is a woman I know who is constantly affirming her inability to better her condition. She answers her better-off friends who tell her that she ought to have this and that by saying, "Oh, it is all very well for you rich folks to talk this way, but these things are not for me. We have always been poor and I suppose we always shall be; we can only have the bare necessities of life, and are fortunate if we get these. Of course I might indulge in a little treat for myself and the children now and then, but that would be extravagant, and I must save for a rainy day."
Now, I have no quarrel with people who save for a rainy day. It is the part of prudence to be prepared for all emergencies. It is a splendid thing to save for spending, for enjoyment in our later years, but people who begin early to provide for the "rainy day," and who deny themselves every little pleasure and enjoyment for the sake of adding to this provision, fall into the habit of pinching themselves, and usually continue to do so through life.
This woman limits her supply by her conviction that every cent she can spare must go to the rainy day fund because she is always going to be poor. She a.s.sures herself and others that she is never going to have the things she would like to have, because of her poverty, and so she starves the lives of herself and her boy and girl in antic.i.p.ating a day of possible want. She is a type of a mult.i.tude of men and women who settle down to their poverty, become half reconciled to its limitations, and do not make a strenuous effort to get away from it. That is, they never dream of exercising their creative, positive thought, but continue to live and to realize in their conditions the negative, destructive, poverty thought.
These are the people who are always saying they "cannot afford" things.
They cannot afford to send the boy or girl to school or college this year. They cannot afford the necessary clothes or the needed vacation because of the rainy day, which, like a specter, rises at every feast, on every occasion when they try to get some enjoyment or satisfaction out of the present. They are always postponing things till next year.
But this "next year" never comes, and the children never go to the academy or college, and they themselves never take the needed vacation, the travel in one"s own country or the long promised trip abroad. They keep forever postponing the enjoyment of the good things of life until they can "afford it;" and that time never comes for people of this apprehensive habit of mind, because they always want to lay up a little more for the future.
I know a number of people well along in years who are still pinching themselves not only on the comforts but even on the necessities of life in antic.i.p.ation of the possible rainy day, for which they are always planning. They make life one long continuous rainy day, and little realize that they often tend to create the need for which they are perpetually saving.
We sometimes read in newspapers striking ill.u.s.trations of the results of this starved, rainy day habit of mind. A New York daily recently reported a typical instance; that of an aged woman who had died alone in the slums of the metropolis. She had been dead several days when her body was found, and so wretched were her surroundings, it was at first supposed that she was penniless. On investigation, however, it was found that the woman had had in ready cash and in bank deposits, almost ten thousand dollars.
Pauperized by her diseased mind, this wretched creature, like many another poverty-stricken soul, died of starvation in the midst of plenty. Her mind was so obsessed with the poverty thought that she even denied herself the necessities of life. For years she had shut herself away from the great stream of life flowing all around her, so that she might h.o.a.rd, and h.o.a.rd, and h.o.a.rd. She would allow no one to enter her rooms, and died alone and uncared for, leaving behind her the money which would have made her comfortable, happy, useful, and would have prolonged her life. She was as truly a victim of the poverty disease as though she didn"t have a cent.
The children of Israel while pa.s.sing through the wilderness were constantly reflecting the poverty thought,--"Can G.o.d furnish for us a table in the wilderness? Of course not, it is not reasonable. We shall starve if we do not get back to Egypt." But for the faith of their great leader, Moses, in the Power that led them, they would have gone back to Egypt, back to the slavery and poverty from which they had fled. Even after the manna had been given them fresh every day for a long time, they did not believe the supply would continue. They were still skeptical and tried to store enough manna for "a rainy day," but it would not keep and they were forced to trust to a new supply every day.
"But where is our supply coming from? How are we going to pay the rent, the mortgage off the home, the farm? Where is the money coming from?
What will happen to us if we cannot get it? Where are the children"s clothes coming from? How are we going to get the necessaries of life?
Where is our supply coming from? Why can"t I get a job that will enable us to really live?" These are the questions mult.i.tudes of people all over the world are asking themselves. They express the acuteness of the suffering from the poverty disease, so apparent in every civilized country.
Nothing else gives human beings so much anxiety, nothing else is such a perpetual irritant as this fear of what is coming in the future, this dread of poverty, of not being able to provide for the necessities and the comforts of those dear to us, the fear of not being able to maintain ourselves and to rear our children in comfort and respectability. It demagnetizes us, drives away the things we want and draws to us those we dread. Job said, "The thing I greatly feared has come upon me"--that which I was afraid of has come to me. People who have an abnormal fear of poverty attract the very condition they dread and are trying to get away from, because the mind relates with whatever it dwells on. Our doubts and hatreds and fears; the thing we relate with, we attract.
Whatever you allow your mind to dwell on, you are unconsciously creating. If you think continually of misfortunes, of poverty; if you fear you are going to fail in your work, that you may come to want; if you are always thinking about the possibility of your business declining; if you fear you are losing your grip on your trade or profession, you are aggravating your trouble and making it worse and worse. There are mult.i.tudes of people who never expect even to be comfortable, to say nothing of having luxuries. They expect poverty, hard times, and do not understand that this very expectancy increases their magnetic power to attract what they do not want.
Not long ago a young man who was greatly depressed because he could not get on in the world, asked me what I thought the trouble was. He said he had always worked hard, but did not seem to make any headway. About all he could do was to earn a bare living. Everything appeared to go against him. Fate, he complained, seemed determined to keep him down, no matter how hard he might struggle against it, and he was doomed to be poor, to be a n.o.body. He believed that hard luck, poverty and failure were family traits; for his father and grandfather, he said, were hard workers too, but they could never get on, never get away from poverty, and he didn"t expect he ever would either.
Another, an older man, who sought my advice in a similar difficulty, lamented the fearful inequality of human conditions, and railed against his luck and the injustice of fate. "I work early and late, Sundays and holidays," he said, "and haven"t taken a vacation for years. I have been struggling and striving and pushing to make my way in the world since I was a boy, and here I am past fifty and have never succeeded in anything yet. Now there is something wrong somewhere in society when such persistence and such constant efforts do not enable one to get anywhere, or to rise to any position worth while."
I asked him about his early training and education. He acknowledged that he had not made much of a preparation for his life work, because, he said, his father also had been a tremendous worker, had always tried hard to better his condition but like himself had never succeeded, and so he had come to the conclusion that success was not in the family, and that it was no use to spend years in preparing for a career, for there was no chance that very much would come to him anyway.
These two are types of people who are constantly heading toward poverty and failure in their minds, and then complaining when they have got what they invited. By the law of mental attraction they could not get anything but poverty and failure. Each had desired success and prosperity but had always expected the opposite. He had slaved and toiled in an aimless sort of way, belittling himself and his talents, with the inner belief that it was all he was good for anyway, and that if success by any chance ever came his way it would be a stroke of luck, and not because it was his due by inherent right.
No man can become prosperous as long as he holds in his mind the picture of limitation, of lack and want. We do not get things in this world which we do not believe we can get. We do not accomplish what we doubt we can do, even though we have the ability to do it.
I knew a boy in college who always felt certain he was going to fail in his examinations, and he did fail invariably. Yet it was due more to his fear, his terror, of failure than to a lack of ability or preparation in his studies. He had formed a habit of expecting failure, of predicting misfortunes, of looking and preparing for them, and so far as I know they have followed him through life.
In every community, in every occupation and profession, there are able, conscientious men and women who try very hard, so far as their actual labor is concerned, to get on in the world, but who don"t expect to get on. It is pitiful to see them toiling day after day, but always facing in the wrong direction. They are working for success in their vocations, working for a competence for themselves and their families, but all the time expecting failure, antic.i.p.ating poverty, living in an atmosphere of mental penury.
There is no law of philosophy by which you can possibly produce just the opposite of what you are holding in your mind, what you are concentrating on. If you are thinking down, if you are afraid, are worried, if you have fears and doubts, if you keep visualizing, thinking, talking hard times, panics and financial crises, your business will shrink and shrivel accordingly. If, on the other hand, you have confidence, expectation of better things, if you are convinced that conditions are going to improve, you set in motion a thought current that will back your efforts with an irresistible force. But a thought current saturated with the fear of failure, with doubts and discouragement will neutralize your most strenuous efforts.
Instead of starting on their active careers with the victorious att.i.tude, with the idea that their careers are to be a triumphal march, many, if not the majority of youths, begin with the impression that they are not victory organized. This is because they have lived in a failure atmosphere, and have absorbed the poverty idea. They have been reared with the fear of failure in their minds, a dread of poverty, a terror of coming to want.
Write it in your heart that a beneficent Creator, who planned a universe full of good things for our use and enjoyment, never meant that we should starve or be miserable. If we are unsuccessful, unhappy, it is because of our att.i.tude toward G.o.d and life. Most of us a.s.sume the position of beggars instead of that of children of an all-powerful Father, and we remain beggars to the end.
One of the worst things about being very poor is the danger of becoming reconciled to penury, expecting it, holding the conviction that we shall always be poor, that there is no help for it. The habit of thinking we must remain poor because we are so is a paralyzing habit.
Whatever we have accustomed ourselves to for any length of time tends to become a fixed mode of life. Mult.i.tudes of people have become so accustomed to their poverty environment, so used to taking it for granted that they are going to remain poor, that they do not take the necessary steps to get away from poverty; and they do not even know that the first step must be a mental one. Instead of this they are all the time affirming their poverty, getting more and more deeply imbedded in the poverty condition by their poverty thoughts and convictions.
The early years of mult.i.tudes of children are saturated with the poverty suggestion. They breathe a poverty atmosphere. They hear poverty talk perpetually. They acquire a poverty vocabulary. Their fathers and mothers are always talking poverty, bemoaning their hard conditions, complaining that they were born poor, and must die poor. Children reared in such a mental environment get a sort of poverty habit from which it is very difficult to get away.