Chapter 4: The Inner Life as Related to Outward Beauty

We once knew a little girl who said that she "was so happy because everybody loved her so." She could not see how anybody could be unhappy. Everybody loved her because she loved them. She would go out in the fields and clap her hands for the very joy of being alive. Every bird and flower and shrub seemed to say to her, “Be happy."

But why should we not all feel this way? Everybody and every object of nature is an expression of some Divine idea, and if we see things through the eyes of innocence and truth, if we see things as God made them, and not the distorted images which we see through the ugly glasses of our own wrong thinking and vicious living, if we could see realities, everything would say to us, "Be happy, be successful; be harmonious." If we were perfectly normal, we should be so contented and happy that life would be a perpetual joy. There will be no poverty, no suffering when all the world arrives at the point where everybody can see realities and live the truth.

It always seems incongruous to see a hard, greedy, grasping, selfish face in the country. It is so out of keeping with all the suggestive beauty and symbolisms of God. Such discord has no place in God's harmony. What a contrast between such a face and the loveliness and sweetness which are radiated from flowers and meadows, forest and birds.

A stranger who saw such a face in the midst of natural grandeur and beauty would say that it must have dropped to the earth from some other planet; that it could never have been developed on this beautiful earth.

Selfishness and greed and sin, and all discordant conditions, have no place in God's kingdom. They are foreign to all that He has made. The only wrong things in the universe come from wrong thinking, vicious living.

Only the “pure in heart” can "see God" or good; only the transparent, sinless mind can see realities, can see beauties. Every sinful thought and every wrong thought, every vicious act hangs an additional film over the eye that sees the things as God made them; and we must get these films off by right thinking and right living before we can see the world as God made it or appreciate the man as God made him.

Every film of selfishness or self-seeking, every film of dishonesty or taking advantage of another, of standing in another's way or keeping another back, must be removed before we can get the clear, crystalline vision of reality, of truth.

Many of us keep adding these films in our efforts to get pleasure and profit, until our spiritual vision is completely lost, until the lens of our vision becomes absolutely opaque and we can see nothing but the gross, the material. Everything looks black and sordid through the selfish, greedy, dishonest glasses.

No man can see anything in this world except through the lens of his own acts, of his own thought, of his own motives. The vision must be colored by the medium through which we look. Every act of our lives, every thought, every motive is hung up before our eyes, and we are compelled to look at everything through them. If the act is clean, the thought is pure, and the deed is true, there will be perfect transparency, and we shall see truth and beauty and realities instead of distorted, ugly, vicious, hideous images. We must get the films off the eyes before we can get perfect vision.

Making The Most of A Happy Temperament.

When God made the rose, He said, "Thou shall flourish and spread thy perfume." This is the command that came to us when we came out of the silence into this world: "Scatter thy perfume, thy flowers, thy sunshine as thou goest along, for thou wilt never go over the same road again."

Did you ever realize how many friends and business patrons you may drive away through a habitual sour, repulsive expression and a repellent manner? Everybody is trying to get out of the gloom into the light, out of the cold into the warmth. Everybody is looking for brightness, trying to get away from shadows into the sunshine. They want to get into harmony and away from discord.

The art of optimism, if understood and practised, would change the face of the world. Just try the cultivation of the sunny side of your nature for a year. It would revolutionize your whole life. You would attract where now you repel; warm and cheer where now, perhaps, you chill and discourage. Compare the power of a shadow with that of a ray of sunlight. All the life, all the physical force on the globe is in the stored up energy of the sunbeam. There is no life or hope in the darkness. How we love people who always carry sunshine; we look at them to get new inspiration and renew our confidence in human nature. We turn to them naturally, as the sunflower turns its face to the sun; and we turn as naturally away from the faces that are overcast, — where a thunderstorm seems to be gathering. The bright, joyous heart is a great boon, and the face that carries habitual sunshine is a perpetual blessing.

We make the world we live in and shape our own environment. Some of us live in dungeons of our own making, then complain of the darkness and the gloom. The pessimists, the men and women who see darkness, despair, disaster and deterioration everywhere, the people who see the world going backwards, carry very little weight compared with the optimists, the men and women who see the best in everything, who see the man and the woman that God made, not those that disease and discord and sin have marred and scarred. It is the men that see the world that God made with all its beauty, its sunshine and promise and hope, not the people who see the ugliness, the deformity everywhere, who have lifted civilization up from barbarity to its present condition. These benignant faces which scatter serenity and hope do more to lift the burdens of the world than the thousand long-faced, sober people who tell you to prepare for the world to come, but never have a smile for the world they are in.

The qualities we cultivate will finally dominate the thought, will outpicture themselves on the body, and will rule the life. We find that the world we live in is the one that is reflected from within us. The world flings us back the echoes of our own voices, our own thoughts. If we are sad and gloomy it will fling back despair, discouragement and hopelessness; but if we turn to it a sunny face and a bright, satisfied heart it will give us back the same in kind.

One person finds enjoyment wherever he goes, everything seems to suggest pleasure and happiness to him, he finds everybody kind and accommodating, everybody seems glad to aid him and favor him or show him a courtesy; another frets and complains and finds fault at everything, sees no cause for joy, and looks upon the world as a cold, dismal, forbidding place, — and he finds just what he is looking for.

The whole world is but a whispering gallery, an echoing hall, which flings back the echo of our own complaints or commendations; a mirror which reflects the face we make in it