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Contents

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Endnotes

A Book of Suggestive Thoughts for Each Day Through the Year

New York

Dodd, Mead And Company

1919

Copyright, 1919

By Ralph Waldo Trine

January

January First

Each morning is a fresh beginning. We are, as it were, just beginning life. We have it entirely in our own hands. And when the morning with its fresh beginning comes, all yesterdays should be yesterdays, with which we have nothing to do. Sufficient is it to know that the way we lived our yesterday has determined for us our today. And, again, when the morning with its fresh beginning comes, all tomorrows should be tomorrows, with which we have nothing to do. Sufficient to know that the way we live our today determines our tomorrow.

Simply the first hour of this new day, with all its richness and glory, with all its sublime and eternity-determining possibilities, and each succeeding hour as it comes — but not before it comes. This is the secret of character building.

January Second

Faith and hope and courage are great producers. We cannot fail if we live always in the brave and cheerful attitude of mind and heart — he alone fails who gives up and lies down.

January Third

Each is building his own world. We build both from within and we attract from without. Thought is the force with which we build — for thoughts are forces — like builds like and like attracts like.

Thoughts of strength build strength from within and attract it from without. Thoughts of weakness actualize weakness from within and attract it from without. Courage begets strength; fear begets weakness.

Our prevailing thought forces determine likewise the mental atmosphere we create around us, and all who come within its influence are affected in one way or another, according to the quality of that atmosphere.

January Fourth

In life the great secret of all advancement and attainment is to set the face in the right direction and then simply to travel on, unmindful of even frequent lapses by the way. He who knows the power of the forward look, realizes that unforeseen helps will spring up all along the way for him who makes the start, and who works true to the pattern.

January Fifth

There is no quality that exerts more good and that is of greater service to all mankind during the course of the ordinary life, than the mind and the heart that goes out in an all-embracing love for all, that is the generator and the circulator of a genuine, hearty, wholesome sympathy and courage and good cheer, that is not disturbed or upset by the passing occurrence little or great, but that is serene, tranquil, and conquering to the end; that is looking for the best, that is finding the best, and that is inspiring the best in all.

There is, moreover, no quality that when genuine brings such rich returns to its possessor by virtue of the thoughts and the feelings that it inspires and calls forth from others, and that come back laden with their peaceful, stimulating, healthful influences for him.

January Sixth

Courage is a mental power that makes for success; fear on the other hand has concealed within it a force that neutralizes normal, healthy action, and fear therefore induces failure. Before the man or the woman of positive, commanding thought — of courage — doors open, difficulties vanish, and ideas and ideals are gradually transformed into accomplishment and achievement.

January Seventh

We can't have an expansive stretch of healthy life without an expansive sweep of the mind. Littleness of mind, jealousy, envy, the tendency to gossip, looking for the faults rather than for the good traits in others, all have their adverse, stultifying, dwarfing influences.

January Eighth

Happiness is the natural and the normal; it is one of the concomitants of righteousness. Righteousness in its last analysis is living in right relations with the laws of the universe, and with the laws of our own being. If we are making even a decent effort to know and to observe these laws, happiness in the main will be our portion.

No clear thinking or clear seeing man or woman can be an apostle of despair. No life at whatever age, or under whatever circumstances, can fail to do wisely in realizing that the glories of the sunrise or the sunset colours may be just as brilliant and just as beautiful for them, as they have ever been.

The better we understand life, the more we come to realize that happiness is a duty.

January Ninth

We are on the way from the imperfect to the perfect; someday, in this life or some other, we shall reach our destiny. It is as much the part of folly to waste time and cripple our forces in vain, unproductive regrets in regard to the occurrences of the past as it is to cripple our forces through fears and forebodings for the future.

There is no experience in any life which if rightly recognized, rightly turned and thereby wisely used, cannot be made of value; many times things thus turned and used can be made sources of inestimable gain; ofttimes they become veritable blessings in disguise.

January Tenth

Sweetness of nature, simplicity in manners and conduct, humility without self-abasement, give the truly kingly quality to men, the queenly to women, the winning to children, whatever the rank or the station may be. The life dominated by this characteristic, or rather these closely allied characteristics, is a natural well-spring of joy to itself and sheds a continual benediction upon all who come within the scope of its influence. It makes for a life of great beauty in itself, and it imparts courage and hope and buoyancy to all others.

January Eleventh

The grander natures and the more thoughtful are always looking for and in conversation dwelling on the better things in others. It is the rule with but few, if any exceptions, that the more noble and worthy and thoughtful the nature, the more it is continually looking for the best there is to be found in every life. Instead of judging or condemning, or acquiring the habit that eventually leads to this, it is looking more closely to and giving its time to living more worthily itself.

It is in this way continually unfolding and expanding in beauty and in power; it is finding an ever-increasing happiness by the admiration and the love that such a life is always, even though all unconsciously, calling to itself from all sources. It is the life that pays by many fold.

January Twelfth

Sometime, even but a brief period, spent during the course of each day out in the open, is a prime necessity in keeping oneself up to par. One reason that we are not so uniformly healthy as we might and should be, is that our modern life has become so artificial. We live too continually behind closed walls, in closed houses, we get too far away from simple, though body-building and sustaining foods, we do not breathe fully and deeply enough an abundance of good fresh air. These, if not always the direct causes of depleted nerve force and even nervous exhaustion and breakdowns, are nevertheless prime contributory agencies.

God's great out-of-doors is ever calling, and if we do not heed its call, it will send into us bills that will call for heavy and sometimes frightful settlements. We need at times to take up again the play-life of our childhood. After all we are all merely grown-up children. To deceive ourselves with the idea that we are something totally different means, many times, the paying of very costly bills.

January Thirteenth

It is the man or woman of faith, and hence of courage, who is the master of circumstances, and who makes his or her power felt in the world. It is the man or the woman who lacks faith and who as a consequence is weakened and crippled by fears and forebodings, who is the creature of all passing occurrences.

January Fourteenth

Wise is the one who, as the days speed onward, realizes the importance of always keeping his mental poise, and who does not allow himself in the face of any circumstance to get, as we say, "all balled up." It is then that hindrance arises in connection with the very thing we are endeavouring to accomplish. It is then that the "little demons" seem to creep in and play havoc with our mental and nervous force and energy, which inevitably in turn registers itself illy in our bodies. This state then becomes a hindrance to the mental poise and to the effective efforts of those about us. Things we can mend we should mend. Things that we can't help we should accept with good grace and then quickly forget.

"It is no use to grumble and complain;

It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice.

When God sorts out the weather and sends rain —

Why, rain's my choice."

So sang James Whitcomb Riley, and into the one brief stanza he packed practically half the philosophy of life.

January Fifteenth

There is a powerful influence that resolves itself into a service for all in each individual strong, pure and noble life.

January Sixteenth

The way we approach the daily problems of life will in practically every case determine their outcome. We will then inoculate our minds with the germs of happiness; it is just as easy, when we get the habit, as to have them inoculated with the germs of fear or worry or discontent — and the results are always better. Why then will we think of those things that are unpleasant? As it will do us no good in any way, why then cripple our thoughts and thereby our energies when by it there is nothing to be gained, but on the contrary everything to be lost?

January Seventeenth

There is a duty of bravery the same as there is a bravery many times in duty. It's the duty and it should be the pleasure of each while here to think bravely and to live bravely straight through to the end. It's the manly and the womanly thing to do — and besides it pays. To take captive the best things in life we must proceed always through the channel of brave, intrepid thought.

It was Maeterlinck who said: "The happiest man is he who best understands his happiness, and he who understands it best is he who knows profoundly that his happiness is only divided from sorrow by a lofty, unwearying, humane and courageous view of life."

January Eighteenth

Life and its manifold possibilities of unfoldment and avenues of enjoyment — life and the things that pertain to it — is an infinitely greater thing than the mere accessories of life.

January Nineteenth

Fear and lack of faith go hand in hand. The one is born of the other. I do not believe one can be a Christian who lives in the slavery, or even to any appreciable degree under the influence of fear or even of worry. Why? Jesus taught the All-ness of God. If one then truly follow Him he can find no room for either fear or worry. God is imminent as well as transcendent. I do not believe that anyone can be a real follower of any religion, who allows these forces to find a place in his or her life.

The great underlying principle, indeed, the sum and substance of all religion is — The consciousness of God in the soul of man. If we actually live in this consciousness, if we open ourselves so that this Divine guidance and power can work in and through us, what place is there for either fear or worry? Only good can come to such a life. Why bother ourselves then about those things that cannot come?

January Twentieth

Many a man, many a woman, has had a good round half dozen years or even more clipped from his or her life in moping, in vain and absolutely foolish regrets for this or that occurrence or series of occurrences in the past, thereby blocking initiative and neutralizing powers that rightly used would have led speedily to actualizing the attainment of the conditions desired.

January Twenty-first

It is well for one not to try to do too much each day. To do what one can with ease, and to let the rest go without qualms or misgivings of any type will brighten many days in many lives. Are there too many social duties? Then cut some of them off. It will be found just as well otherwise. To become a slave to one's engagements and to allow oneself to fall below par, mentally and physically thereby, can result in no real benefit to anybody. The complexing element thrown into one's life in this way, is just as destructive to real growth, and to happiness and satisfaction, as is the introduction of too many material things in life.

January Twenty-second

Hope and courage and sympathy and trust are great producers, and they are great factors in a man's doing his duty, as well as his having the joy of achievement.

January Twenty-third

Many times the struggles are greater than we can ever know. We need more gentleness and sympathy and compassion in our common human life. Then we will neither blame nor condemn. Instead of blaming or condemning we will sympathize.

"Comfort one another.

For the way is often dreary

And the feet are often weary,

And the heart is very sad.

There is a heavy burden bearing,

When it seems that none are caring,

And we half forget that ever we were glad.

"Comfort one another

With the hand-clasp close and tender,

With the sweetness love can render,

And the looks of friendly eyes.

Do not wait with grace unspoken,

While life's daily bread is broken —

Gentle speech is oft like manna from the skies."

And then when we fully realize the fact that selfishness is at the root of all error, sin, and crime, and that ignorance is the basis of all selfishness, with what charity we come to look upon the acts of all. It is the ignorant man who seeks his own ends at the expense of the greater whole. It is the ignorant man, therefore, who is the selfish man.

January Twenty-fourth

The wise one is he who when he stumbles and falls — even flat — gives time enough to recognize the cause, who quickly learns his lesson, and who then picks himself up and goes on without wasting even a moment in regret.

January Twenty-fifth

In a sense love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world. Live only in the thought of love for all and you will draw love to you from all. Live in the thought of malice or hatred, and malice and hatred will come back to you.

"For evil poisons; malice shafts

Like boomerangs return,

Inflicting wounds that will not heal

While rage and anger burn."

Every thought you entertain is a force that goes out, and every thought comes back laden with its kind. This is an immutable law. Every thought you entertain has moreover a direct effect upon your body. Love and its kindred emotions are the normal and the natural, those in accordance with the eternal order of the universe, for "God is love." These have a life-giving, health-engendering influence upon your body, besides beautifying your countenance, enriching your voice, and making you ever more attractive in every way.

And as it is true that in the degree that you hold thoughts of love for all, you call the same from them in return, and as these have a direct effect upon your mind, and through your mind upon your body, it is as so much life force added to your own from without. You are then continually building this into both your mental and your physical life, and so your life is enriched by its influence.

January Twenty-sixth

Life is not so complex if we do not persist in making it so. We need faith; we need to be brave; we need chronically to keep the corners of the mouth turned up and not down. And after all it is only a step at a time.

January Twenty-seventh

Ordinarily we find in people the qualities we are mostly looking for, or the qualities that our own prevailing characteristics call forth. The larger the nature, the less critical and cynical it is, the more it is given to looking for the best and the highest in others, and the less, therefore, is it given to gossip.

January Twenty-eighth

Give the body the nourishment, the exercise, the fresh air, the sunlight it requires, keep it clean, and then think of it as little as possible. In your thoughts and in your conversation never dwell upon the negative side. Don't talk of sickness and disease. By talking of these you do yourself harm and you do harm to those who listen to you. Talk of those things that will make people the better for listening to you. Thus you will infect them with health and strength and not with weakness and disease.

To dwell upon the negative side is always destructive. This is true of the body the same as it is true of all other things.

January Twenty-ninth

A man who is not right with his fellowmen is not right and cannot be right with God. This is coming to be the clear-cut realization of all progressive religious thought today. Since men are free from the trammels of an enervating dogma that through fear made them seek, or rather that made them contented with religion as primarily a system of rewards and punishments, they are now awakening to the fact that the logical carrying out of Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom is the establishing here on this earth of an order of life and hence of a society where greater love and cooperation and justice prevail. Our rapidly growing present-day conception of Christianity makes it not world-renouncing, but world-affirming.

This modern conception of the function of a true and vital Christianity makes it the task of the immediate future to apply Christianity to trade, to commerce, to labour relations, to all social relations, to international relations.

January Thirtieth

He who has the quest of the good in his heart relates himself thereby with all the higher forces in the universe and they aid him at every turn.

If we have faith, if we have patience and perseverance, there is no condition, no experience that rightly viewed and rightly turned and used will not bring us stores of good.

January Thirty-first

Containing a fundamental truth deeper perhaps than we realize, are these words of that gifted seer, Emanuel Swedenborg: "There is only one Fountain of Life, and the life of man is a stream therefrom, which if it were not continually replenished from its source would instantly cease to flow." And likewise these: "Those who think in the light of interior reason can see that all things are connected by intermediate links with the First Cause, and that whatever is not maintained in that connection must cease to exist."

There is a mystic force that transcends any powers of the intellect or of the body, that becomes manifest and operative in the life of man when this God-consciousness becomes awakened and permeates his entire being.

February

February First

God give us more of the people who set about definitely and actively to cultivate the habit of happiness, people the corners of whose mouths are turned chronically up not down, people who are looking for, inspiring and calling forth the best from all.

February Second

If we believe ourselves subject to weakness, decay, infirmity, when we should be "whole," the subconscious mind seizes upon the pattern that is sent it and builds cell structure accordingly. This is one great reason why one who is, as we say, chronically thinking and talking of his ailments and symptoms, who is complaining and fearing, is never well.

To see oneself, to believe, and therefore to picture oneself in mind as strong, healthy, active, well, is to furnish a pattern, is to give suggestion and therefore direction to the subconscious so that it will build cell tissue having the stamp and the force of healthy, vital, active life, which in turn means abounding health and strength. Whatever is thus pictured in the mind and lived in, the Life Force will produce.

February Third

There has been probably no truer statement ever given utterance to in the world's history, and one containing greater hope or strength for each individual life that places itself sufficiently in position fully to know its truth than: "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." The Law will never fail him who trusts himself fully to It. It is the half-hearted, fearing, vacillating trusting that always has and that always will bring unsatisfactory results.

February Fourth

The prophet of old proclaimed a wonderful chemistry of life when he said: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” And the great beauty of it is that it doeth good not only for the self, but for the companion, the friend and the neighbour.

February Fifth

We need continually to be on the lookout that we keep ourselves up to par, so to speak, both mentally and physically. Our modern American life especially demands this. The practice of taking a quiet hour or even a half hour a day, alone by oneself, for quiet, for relaxation, for rest, will be found to be of inestimable benefit to the one who is wise enough specifically to adopt this practice.

To get away from the confusion of household duties, or the daily routine, to get away from contact, sometimes confusing and at times even a little jarring, with those about one, in order to regain one's mental and physical power and through them one's poise, will bring rich benefits to any life. Especially is this of value to mothers and home-makers, where many times arrangements, duties, labours, never cease.

February Sixth

The life that goes out in love to all is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power. Such is the life that becomes ever more inclusive, and hence larger in its scope and influence.

February Seventh

He who understands the laws of life most fully will take more and more the mental attitude of happiness. It is just as easy as its opposite; and in time it becomes the habit. It is better and a great deal cheaper. The better we understand life, the more we come to the realization of the fact that happiness is a duty. It signifies that we are working in harmony with the laws of our being. It is one of the concomitants of righteousness. Righteousness in its last analysis will be found to be living in right relations with the laws of our being and with the laws of the universe about us.

This attitude, this habit of happiness is also a benefit to others. As cheerfulness induces cheerfulness in others, so happiness inspires and induces happiness. We communicate this condition to those about us. Its effects come back in turn from them to us again. As anger inspires anger, as love and sympathy inspire love and sympathy in others — each of its kind, so cheerfulness and happiness inspire the same in others.

February Eighth

The wisest and most interesting men talk little, think much, complain never, but travel on. How far have you come today, Brother?

February Ninth

Abounding health and strength-wholeness — is the natural law of the body. The Life Force of the body, acting always under the direction of the subconscious mind, will build, and always does build, healthily and normally, unless too much interfered with.

It is this that determines the type of the cell structure that is continually being built into the body from the available portions of the food that we take to give nourishment to the body. It is affected for good or for ill, helped or hindered, in its operation by the type of conscious thought that is directed toward it, and that it is always influenced by.

February Tenth

Here is a wall being built. Bricks are the material used in its construction. We do not say that the bricks are building the wall; we say that the mason is building it, as is the case. He is using the material that is supplied him, in this case bricks, giving form and structure in a definite, methodical manner. Again, back of the mason is his mind, acting through the channel of his thought, that is directing his hands and all his movements. Without this guiding, directing force no wall could take shape, even if millions of bricks were delivered upon the scene.

So it is with the body. We take the food, the water, we breathe the air; but this is all and always acted upon by a higher force. Thus it is that mind builds body, the same as in every department of our being it is the great builder. Our thoughts shape and determine our features, our walk, the posture of our bodies, our voices; they determine the effectiveness of our mental and our physical activities, as well as all our relations with and influence or effects upon others.

February Eleventh

There is an especial duty at middle age to sow the right seed thoughts that will make the latter period of life as beautiful and as attractive as it can be made.

February Twelfth

As we grow older, we are continually in more danger of becoming too serious than the contrary. God deliver us from the men and women who become so serious — so chronically serious — that they haven't the time or the inclination for the occasional levity, for the day off, who gradually push out from their make-up a good, wholesome sense of the humorous.

If God intended anything, He intended that we live simply and naturally, that we grow, — sometimes through knocks, — and growing that we contribute our share to the neighbour's and the world's life and work, but that we be happy while we do it. The real welfare of the world never has depended and never will depend upon any one man or woman.

There are of course especially busy times in every life. To be serious while in the midst of these times may be well, but to allow oneself to grow so that he becomes chronically serious, sometimes defeats the very effectiveness of his efforts, while at the same time it gradually renders him a sort of bore both to himself and to those about him.

February Thirteenth

If our heart goes out in love to all with whom we come in contact, we inspire love and the same ennobling and warming influences of love always return to us from those in whom we inspire them.

February Fourteenth

Back of and working continually in and through the human will is the Divine will. God is spirit, said the Christ — not a spirit, which is now known to be a faulty translation of the Greek — but God is spirit. God is that spirit of Infinite Life and Power that is back of all, working in and through all, the essential life and force in all.

To realize the essential oneness of our lives with this Spirit of all Life and all Power, to think and to act always from this conscious Centre, is to grow in the realization and in the appropriation of an ever-greatening degree of Divine guidance and power.

To know God whom the Christ revealed, is to come into an ever-enlarging knowledge of the Divine laws and forces that are at work in our lives and in the universe about us.

February Fifteenth

Failure to realize and to keep in constant communion with our Source is what causes fears, forebodings, worry, inharmony, conflict, conflict that downs us many times in mind, in spirit, in body — failure to follow that Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, failure to hear and to heed that Voice of the soul, that speaks continually clearer as we accustom ourselves to listen to and to heed it, failure to follow those intuitions with which the soul, every soul, is endowed, and that lead us aright and that become clearer in their leadings as we follow them. It is this guidance and this sustaining power that all great souls fall back upon in times of great crises.

February Sixteenth

Whatever estimate you put upon yourself will determine the effectiveness of your work along any line. As long as you live merely in the physical and the intellectual, you set limitations to yourself that will hold you as long as you so live.

The men and the women who are truly awake to the real powers within are the men and women who seem to be doing so little, yet who in reality are doing so much.

February Seventeenth

All great educators are men of great vision. It was Dr. Hiram Corson who said: "It is what man draws up from his sub-self, which is of prime importance in his true education, not what is put into him. It is the occasional uprising of our sub-selves that causes us, at times, to feel that we are greater than we know." A new psychology, spiritual science, a more common-sense interpretation of the great revelation of the Christ of Nazareth, all combine to enable us to make this occasional uprising our natural and normal state.

To follow the higher leadings of the soul, which is so constituted that it is the inlet, and as a consequence the outlet of Divine Spirit, Creative Energy, the real source of all wisdom and power; to project its leadings into every phase of material activity and endeavour, constitutes the ideal life. It was Emerson who said: "Every soul is not only the inlet, but may become the outlet of all there is in God." To keep this inlet open, so as not to shut out the Divine inflow, is the secret of all higher achievement, as well as attainment.

February Eighteenth

Be true to the highest within your own soul, and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary manmade rules that are not founded upon principle.

February Nineteenth

The peevish, gloomy, grumbling, panicky, critical — the small — cast a sort of deadening, unwholesome influence wherever they go. They get, however, what they give, for they inspire and call back to themselves thoughts and feelings of the kind they are sufficiently stupid to allow to be a dominating influence in their own lives. People ruled by the mood of gloom attract to themselves gloomy people and gloomy conditions, those that are of no help to them, but rather a hindrance.

The cheerful, confident, tranquil in all circumstances are continually growing in these same qualities, for the mind grows by and in the direction of that which it feeds upon. This process of mental chemistry is continually working in our lives, bringing us desirable or undesirable conditions according to our prevailing mental states.

February Twentieth

The course of determining resolutely to expect only those things which we desire, or which will be ultimately for our larger good, of thinking health and strength rather than disease and weakness, an abundance for all our needs rather than poverty, success rather than failure, of looking for and calling from others the best there is in them, is one of the greatest aids also to bodily health and perfection.

As a rule one seldom knows of those of this trend or determination of mind complaining of physical ailments, because they are generally free from the long list of ailments and disabilities that have their origin in perverted emotional and mental states, that by being regularly fed are allowed to externalize themselves and become settled conditions.

February Twenty-first

To love the fields and the wildflowers, the stars, the far-open sea, the soft, warm earth, and to live much with them alone; but to love struggling and weary men and women and every pulsing, living creature better.

February Twenty-second

Our complex modern life, especially in our larger centres, gets us running so many times into grooves that we are prone to miss, and sometimes for long periods, the all-round, completer life. We are led at times almost to forget that the "stars come nightly to the sky," or even that there is a sky; that there are hedgerows and groves where the birds are always singing and where we can lie on our backs and watch the treetops swaying above us and the clouds floating by an hour or hours at a time; where one can live with his soul or, as Whitman has put it, where one can loaf and invite his soul.

February Twenty-third

We need changes from the duties and the cares of our accustomed everyday life. They are necessary for healthy, normal living. We need occasionally to be away from our friends, our relatives, from the members of our immediate households. Such changes are good for us; they are good for them. We appreciate them better, they us, when we are away from them for a period, or they from us.

February Twenty-fourth

The thing that pays, and that makes for a well-balanced, useful, and happy life, is not necessarily and is not generally a sombre, pious morality, or any standard of life that keeps us from a free, happy, spontaneous use and enjoyment of all normal and healthy faculties, functions, and powers, the enjoyment of all innocent pleasures — use, but not abuse, enjoyment, but enjoyment through self-mastery and not through license or perverted use, for it can never come that way.

Look where we will, in or out and around us, we will find that it is the middle ground — neither poverty nor excessive riches, good wholesome use without license, a turning into the bye-ways along the main road where innocent and healthy God-sent and God-intended pleasures and enjoyments are to be found; but never getting far enough away to lose sight of the road itself. The middle ground it is that the wise man or woman plants foot upon.

February Twenty-fifth

In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body. And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind, the same as mind helps body.

February Twenty-sixth

The fearing, grumbling, worrying, vacillating do not succeed in anything and generally live by burdening, in some form or another, someone else. They stand in the way of, they prevent their own success; they fail in living even an ordinary healthy, normal life; they cast a blighting influence over and they act as a hindrance to all with whom they at any time come in contact.

The pleasures we take captive in life, the growth and advancement we make, the pleasure and benefit our company or acquaintanceship brings to others, the very desirability of our companionship on the part of others — all depend upon the types of thought we entertain and live most habitually with.

February Twenty-seventh

This is the law of prosperity: When apparent adversity comes, be not cast down by it, but make the best of it, and always look forward for better things, for conditions more prosperous. To hold yourself in this attitude of mind is to set into operation subtle, silent, and irresistible forces that sooner or later will actualize in material form that which is today merely an idea. But ideas have occult power, and ideas, when rightly planted and rightly tended, are the seeds that actualize material conditions.

Never give a moment to complaint, but utilize the time that would otherwise be spent in this way in looking forward and actualizing the conditions you desire. Suggest prosperity to yourself. See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition. Affirm it calmly and quietly, but strongly and confidently. Believe it, believe it absolutely. Expect it, — keep it continually watered with expectation. You thus make yourself a magnet to attract the things that you desire. Don't be afraid to suggest.

February Twenty-eighth

Faith is an invisible and invincible magnet, and attracts to itself whatever it fervently desires and calmly and persistently expects.

March

March First

Everything about us gives unmistakable evidence that the best thought of the age is converging to the point that the Christianity of the Christ has but little to do with any speculations or any formulations of the past; but that it is all the time taking form as Jesus himself epitomized it — Love to God, and love to man. Simple to state, but locked up within them the mightiest force for the uplifting and the glorifying of the individual life, and for the remoulding and the higher consummation of all human relations that we have yet known. The redeemed Christianity relates to the whole man — mind, body, and soul — not to any mythical saving of the soul merely; the soul needs saving only when the mind and the body work wrong.

And so intelligent men and women who know the never-failing Law of Cause and Effect, and who see it as one of God's immutable and never to be evaded laws, are interested primarily in a means of salvation here and now — which incidentally will take care of all salvation hereafter.

One of the great truths that we are in possession of in this twentieth century is that man can cooperate with God to a hitherto undreamed-of degree, and in the degree in which he does, do the higher powers and forces cooperate with him in all his activities, and make accomplishment doubly sure and of the kind that is abundantly safe and permanent.

March Second

We have heard much of "personal magnetism." Careful analysis will, I think, reveal the fact that the one who has to any marked degree the element of personal magnetism is one of the large-hearted, magnanimous, cheer-bringing, unself-centred types, whose positive thought forces are being continually felt by others, and are continually inspiring and calling forth from others these same splendid attributes. I have yet to find anyone, man or woman, of the opposite habits and, therefore, trend of mind and heart who has had or who has even to the slightest perceptible degree the quality that we ordinarily think of when we use the term "personal magnetism."

If one would have friends, he or she must be a friend, must radiate habitually friendly, helpful thoughts, goodwill, love.

March Third

Speculation and belief are giving way to a greater knowledge of law. The supernatural recedes into the background as we delve deeper into the supernormal. The unusual loses its miraculous element as we gain knowledge of the law whereby the thing is done. We are realizing that no miracle has ever been performed in the world's history that was not through the understanding and the use of Law.

Jesus did unusual things; but he did them because of his unusual understanding of the law through which they could be done. He would not have us believe otherwise. To do so would be a distinct contradiction of the whole tenor of his teachings and his injunctions. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free, was his own admonition.

March Fourth

To grow and to keep in person as attractive as possible should be not only every one's pleasure, but should be also every one's duty.

March Fifth

The person of the weak, fearing type of mind and thought is the one who ordinarily dares not attempt whatever his longings or ambitions may be. Or, if venturesome enough to begin, it frequently happens that he lacks that sustaining power or force that is necessary to carry the undertaking through until accomplishment is assured.

It is safe to say that this is true in vast numbers of cases on account of the mind allowing itself to become the victim of, and to be dominated by, fears and forebodings rather than on account of any real lack of sustaining force as such; for ordinarily the mind grows along the lines of its accustomed activity, and strength gathers as we advance, if we have but the fortitude and the stamina to begin.

March Sixth

Vast amounts of pleasure are escaping us, because many times we take too limited a view of life; we forget that, after all, it is the life itself that is good, and that it has almost limitless possibilities of expansion if we would but lift ourselves from the dead level of the commonplace into which we drift many times, all unconsciously, through habit.

We focus our energies upon, we give almost our entire time and attention to the round of daily, petty details. In this way we allow ourselves to become so absorbed in, so possessed and enslaved by them — and even so annoyed by them sometimes to the state of abnormal nervous depletion — that we become engulfed in that dead sea of monotony that makes us all but mad.

March Seventh

One of the misshapen and subtle-mannered sisters of fear is worry. The two generally go hand in hand. They work in pairs. They are of the same parentage — a lack of faith in the eternal goodness of the Divine Power that is back of the universe working continually in it and in all lives, through the instrumentality of great and immutable systems of law, and a lack of faith that all things work together for good, for those who love the good and who are making even a decently brave effort to live a normal, unself-centred, and useful life.

March Eighth

Fear paralyses healthy action, both mental and physical. Worry corrodes, poisons, and pulls down the organism. It is a perverted mental state that externalizes itself in various physical ailments according to the peculiar native tendencies or weaknesses of the one in whose organism its effects find lodgment. Many a death long before its time, in addition to many a depleted nervous and general physical condition, is due directly to it.

There is probably no agency that brings us more undesirable results than worry; and the most interesting feature of the whole matter, as well as the most astonishing, when we examine carefully into it, is the fact that through it nothing is ever to be gained but, on the other hand, everything is to be lost. The appreciation and clear realization of this one fact should be sufficient to arouse us to that degree of determination that will allow it absolutely no place in our lives.

March Ninth

Happiness is the natural and the normal; it is one of the concomitants of righteousness, which means living in right relations with the laws of our being and the laws of the universe about us. No clear-thinking man or woman can be an apostle of despair.

March Tenth

There is a large class, and undoubtedly of increasing proportions, who are missing much of the real pleasures and contentments of life because they have got on a wrong track and are giving more time and attention to the mere accessories of life than to the life itself.

That is the reason many times that those of moderate means, in comfortable circumstances as we say, enjoy a far more natural and normal and therefore happy life than the excessively rich. The great difficulty with many, at least, of the excessively rich is that the natural tendency or drawing is always away from the real place where pleasure and satisfaction that is at all abiding is to be found — within oneself. It was Milton who said: "There is nothing that makes men rich and strong but that which they carry inside of them. Wealth is of the heart, not of the hand."

True, wealth is of value as a means to an end, but never as an end. It is the same as with happiness, it cannot be sought merely as an end with any satisfactory results, for those who make the seeking of it their chief end are among the most unhappy people in the world.

March Eleventh

Back of all modern idealistic philosophy foreshadowing what great minds would eventually deduce through the processes of research and of reason, stands the Galilean Teacher, formulating a world ethic and a world religion through the processes of direct consciousness, by choosing so to order his life that these revelations of the inner life and consciousness might be revealed clearly and unmistakably to him.

The truth that he perceived, and therefore the discovery that he made and presented so simply and so persuasively to the world, was the fact that the human and the Divine are the two phases of the same great order of being, to be personified in man at his highest. There is that in God that manifests itself as, and that therefore becomes, human. There is that in man that is divine and that awaits only his recognition to manifest itself as divine.

The divine essence, the divine Centre of life, came to Jesus as "Father," and to him the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven took the form of a filial relationship between man and God. It was this indwelling divine life, this "Father in me," to which he ascribed all of his wonderful knowledge and all of his wonderful works.

March Twelfth

The things that come into our hands come not for the purpose of being possessed, as we say, much less for the purpose of being hoarded. We are stewards merely, and as stewards we shall be held accountable for the way we use whatever is entrusted to us.

March Thirteenth

Christ is the universal Divine nature in all. It is the state of God-consciousness, it is the recognition of the indwelling God. It is the realization of this Divine life as the essence of our life, as our very life itself, and living continually in thought, and therefore in act, from this the real centre. The man Jesus becomes the Christ Jesus — truly the Messiah and the Saviour of men — by virtue of being the first to sense, to realize, and to travel the Way.

"I believe," said Emerson, "in the still small voice, and that voice is the Christ within me." Man is eternally one with the Divine source of all life. Jesus realizing this in its completeness said, and said most truly, "I and my Father are one." In life, in love, in power, our true being is perfect. As we comprehend the real meaning of this and through the joint agencies of desire and will we live life from its true Centre, we are led into an appreciation of the wonderful possibilities of human life here and now.

March Fourteenth

The son of Joseph and Mary, through his supreme aptitude for the things of the Spirit, realized, as no one before and no one since has realized, that there is an insurgence of the Divine in and through the human, when the human, through desire and through will, meets the conditions whereby this can become a reality.

The Divine Wisdom and Power works in and through the human in the degree that the human in consciousness realizes its true Reality, and so meets the conditions whereby this can come about. It is, so to speak, rightly to connect oneself with the great reservoir of Life. A plant, deriving its sustenance from the soil, cannot have this connection broken or materially interfered with, and maintain an ideal growth and form, if indeed it continue to live at all. Man cannot fail to make and to keep his right relations with the true source of his life, unless it be with the result of a mere physical existence, uncertain, weak, and dwarfed, and piteously below his possibilities.

We will eventually find that the "fall of man" consists in his failure to realize his essential and true identity.

March Fifteenth

We must take ourselves out of the class of the "afraids" — the abnormals. The commanding figures in life do not fear. The time others are giving to it and therefore to allowing the neutralizing and even paralysing power of this perverted mental force to work its havoc in their lives, they are giving to seeing the ideal they would actualize or attain to, and then setting into activity strong, definite, certain types of thought-forces that are hourly and even momentarily working for them along the lines they are going. Thoughts are forces; like creates like, and like attracts like.

The same law is in operation here that is in operation in connection with what we may term the "drawing power of mind," — we are continually attracting to us from both the seen and the unseen sides of life, forces and conditions most akin to our prevailing thoughts and emotions.

March Sixteenth

The hopeful, cheerful, confident find themselves continually growing in faith, in' confident, healthy optimism, in courage; they are also continually attracting and drawing to themselves, thus gaining as friends and helpers those of similar qualities and possessions, and they are likewise inspiring these qualities in others.

March Seventeenth

Thoughts of goodwill, sympathy, magnanimity, good cheer — in brief, all thoughts emanating from a spirit of love — are felt in their positive, warming, and stimulating influences by others; they inspire in turn the same types of thoughts and feelings in them, and they come back to us laden with their ennobling, stimulating, pleasure-bringing influences.

Thoughts of envy, or malice, or hatred, or ill will are likewise felt by others. They are influenced adversely by them. They inspire either the same types of thoughts and emotions in them; or they produce in them a certain type of antagonistic feeling that has the tendency to neutralize and, if continued for a sufficient length of time, deaden sympathy and thereby all friendly relations.

March Eighteenth

The thing to do is not to spend time in railing against the imaginary something we create and call fate, but to look to the within, and change the causes at work there, in order that things of a different nature may come.

March Nineteenth

A very general rule with but few exceptions can be laid down as follows: The body ordinarily looks as old as the mind thinks and feels.

Shakespeare anticipated by many years the best psychology of the times when he said: "It is the mind that makes the body rich."

It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern, should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, and with undiminished vigour from youth to middle age, and then how to carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal more of the vigour and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do.

The mental as well as the physical helps that are now in the possession of our generation, are capable of working a revolution in the lives of many who are or who may become sufficiently awake to them, so that with them there will not be that — shall we say — immature passing from middle life into a broken, purposeless, decrepit, and sunless, and one might almost say, soulless old age.

March Twentieth

To set the face in the right direction, and then simply to travel on, unmindful and never discouraged by even frequent relapses by the way, is the secret of all human achievement.

March Twenty-first

It after all depends upon what we really want — not what we may vaguely or spasmodically desire or even long for, that determines what we really are in habit, in character, in life. If we understand the law and are willing to pay the temporary price, there is practically nothing that we cannot overcome, and at least in quality of habit, character and life attain to.

It is better and more honest to believe that we determine our own fate, and then set about in a manly or a womanly fashion to carry this belief into practice, than to rail against an imaginary something we create and call fate. Henley was the seer as well as the poet when he sang:

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishment the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

March Twenty-second

Our thoughts and emotions are the silent, subtle forces that are constantly externalizing themselves in kindred forms in our outward material world. Like creates like, and like attracts like. As is our prevailing type of thought, so is our prevailing type and our condition of life.

March Twenty-third

The subconscious mind is wonderfully exact in its workings, and it is marvellously responsive to the active thinking mind. To see oneself growing healthfully, to think and to image health and wholeness, instead of disease, to live chronically in the mental attitude of faith, and hope and courage, instead of fear, pessimism and cynicism, creates healthy cell tissue and wholeness of body.

To live in thoughts of love, sympathy, good-will, and service for all of one's neighbours and for all people, instead of with thoughts of hatred or envy or jealousy, means building for health and for wholeness instead of weakness and disease. As is the mind and spirit so inevitably in time will become the body.

March Twenty-fourth

We are living the eternal life now as much as we ever will or ever can live it. The only Heaven we will ever have is the one we realize, make, and carry with us. We determine always our own condition — Heaven or Hell — here and hereafter.

March Twenty-fifth

Ignorance enchains and enslaves. Truth — which is but another way of saying — a clear and definite knowledge of Law, the elemental laws of soul, of mind, and body, and of the universe about us — brings freedom. Jesus revealed essentially a spiritual philosophy of life. His whole revelation pertained to the essential divinity of the human soul and the great gains that would follow the realization of this fact.

His whole teaching revolved continually around his own expression, used again and again, the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, and which he so distinctly stated was an inner state or consciousness or realization. Something not to be found outside of oneself but to be found only within.

March Twenty-sixth

The great and strong character is the one who is ever ready to sacrifice the present pleasure for the future good.

March Twenty-seventh

A person of the strong, positive, faith type, or finality of thought, is the one who not only has the native ability — the initiative as we say — sufficient to begin activities along the lines of his or her dreams or longings or ambitions, but also a force of sufficient sustaining nature to keep true to that set purpose until in time the goal is reached, the purpose accomplished.

In accomplishment, moreover, lies one of the chief pleasures that men or women can know, — unless, perchance, the thing accomplished is of a common or low nature by virtue of its being purely for the individual satisfaction or gain, in distinction from its wider element of use and service for the larger good; and unless, also, he or she become so a slave to it that it absorbs the entire life, so to speak, making it thereby ill-balanced and one-sided.

March Twenty-eighth

Said a bucket to his companion as they were going to the well, "How dismal you look!" "Ah!" replied the other, "I was reflecting on the uselessness of our being filled — for, let us go away ever so full, we always come back empty." "Dear me! How strange to look at it in that way," said the other bucket. "Now I enjoy the thought that, however empty we come, we always go away full. Only look on it in that light and you will be as cheerful as I am." It is a simple, homely little illustration, or parable shall we call it, given utterance to by E. J. Hardy; nevertheless it speaks almost volumes so far as one great fundamental of happy or unhappy living is concerned.

The cheerful, hopeful, expectant habit of mind and heart is one of the most potent factors, or rather agencies, in materializing in life those qualities, and also those conditions and surroundings, that we most fondly desire, and that combine to bring the greatest pleasures and satisfactions into life. Of one thing we can always rest assured: as is our kind of thought so is our kind of life, or so it will inevitably become.

To look for the best, habitually for the best, in all people and all things puts us on the direct line of finding what we are looking for. It moreover puts into operation a positive, active force that tends also to perpetuate itself in our lives; and when this is once in the ascendancy then the fearing, vacillating types and habits of thought have difficulty in making their entrance. The one is the direct antithesis of the other.

March Twenty-ninth

As we understand the laws of scientific mind and body building better, we will realize that whatever changes we would have in the latter we must of necessity first make in the former.

March Thirtieth

We American people are prone to take our work, our business, our professions so seriously and to get so thoroughly in harness, as we say, that we do not take the time for the relaxations and the pleasures that we could enjoy and could give also to those in more immediate contact with us, if we were to stop and consider more carefully than we do. The people of several other countries can give us some valuable lessons along these lines.

To mingle one's pleasures — and I mean always healthy, moderate pleasures — with his work as he goes along, is unquestionably the part of the wise.

March Thirty-first

A lifting up of the mind to the real fundamentals of life occasionally, gives us that enlarged vision, that wider horizon that saves us many times from such complete absorption in the little details, and even trivialities, that we bother about and that will in so many cases take care of themselves if we will but give them the chance and not bother about them. We concern ourselves daily and we bother about things that get us into actual ruts of thought, of work, of habit.

It is for this very reason that the occasional trip away from home, away from those with whom we are in daily contact — the members of our own households — is of great value. The occasional travel — contact with new scenes, agencies, people — gives a change which becomes a rest and which is productive, if we are alert, of a continually wider horizon, so that we return to the home scenes, the home people, and to the duties of daily life again with a freshness of spirit, a wealth of experience, a new angle of vision, and a freshness also of endeavour both mental and physical that cannot help lifting the life to a higher level.

April

April First

We are reconstructing a more natural, a more sane, a more common sense portrait of the Master. "It is the spirit that quickeneth," said he; "the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." Shall we recall again in this connection: "I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly"?

When, therefore, we take him at his word, and listen intently to his words, and not so much to the words of others about him; when we place our emphasis upon the fundamental spiritual truths that he revealed and that he pleaded so earnestly to be taken in the simple, direct way in which he taught them, we are finding that the religion of the Christ means a clearer and healthier understanding of life and its problems through a greater knowledge of the elemental forces and laws of life.

April Second

An unbiased study of Jesus' own words will reveal the fact that he taught only what he himself had first realized. It is this, moreover, that makes him the supreme teacher of all time — Counsellor, Friend, Saviour. It is the saving of men from their lower conceptions and selves, a lifting of them up to their higher selves, which, as he taught, is eternally one with God, the Father, and which, when realized, will inevitably, reflexly, one might say, lift a man's thoughts, acts, conduct — the entire life — up to that standard or pattern.

It is thus that the Divine ideal, that the Christ becomes enthroned within. The Christ-consciousness is the universal Divine nature in us. It is the state of God-consciousness. It is the recognition of the indwelling Divine life as the source, and therefore the essence of our own lives.

April Third

The great purpose at which the Master laboured so incessantly was the teaching of the realization of the Divine will in the hearts and minds, and through these in the lives of men — the finding and the realization of the Kingdom of God. This is the supreme fact of life. Get right at the centre and the circumference will then care for itself. As is the inner, so always and invariably will be the outer. There is an inner guide that regulates the life when this inner guide is allowed to assume authority. Why be disconcerted, why in a heat concerning so many things? It is not the natural and the normal life. Life at its best is something infinitely beyond this. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." And if there is any doubt in regard to his real meaning in this here is his answer: "Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here' or 'Lo there' for behold the Kingdom of God is within you."

April Fourth

A man who is gripped at all vitally by Jesus' teaching of the personal fatherhood of God, and the personal brotherhood of man, simply can't help but make the Golden Rule the basic rule of his life — and moreover find joy in so making it. A man who really comprehends this fundamental teaching can't be crafty, sneaking, dishonest, or dishonourable, in his business, or in any phase of his personal life. He never hogs the penny — in other words, he never seeks to gain his own advantage to the disadvantage of another.

He may be long-headed; he may be able to size up and seize conditions; but he seeks no advantage for himself to the detriment of his fellow, to the detriment of his community, or to the detriment of his extended community, the nation or the world. He is thoughtful, considerate, open, frank; and, moreover, finds great joy in being so.

April Fifth

It is not with observation, said Jesus, that the supreme thing that he taught — the seeking and finding of the Kingdom of God — will come. Do not seek it at some other place, some other time. It is within, and if within it will show forth. Make no mistake about that, — it will show forth. It touches and it sensitizes the inner springs of action in a man's or a woman's life.

When a man realizes his Divine sonship that Jesus taught, he will act as a son of God. Out of the heart spring either good or evil actions. Self-love, me, mine; let me get all I can for myself, or, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself — the Divine law of service, of mutuality — the highest source of ethics.

April Sixth

It is well for one not to try to do too much each day. To do what one can with ease and to let the rest go without qualms or misgivings of any type will brighten many days in many lives.

April Seventh

You can trust any man whose heart is right. He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word will be as good as his bond. Personally you can't trust a man who is brought into any line of action, or into any institution through fear. The sore is there, liable to break out in corruption at any time. The opening up of the springs of the inner life frees him also from the letter of the law, which after all consists of the traditions of men, and makes him subject to that higher moral guide within. How clearly Jesus illustrated this in his conversations regarding the observance of the Sabbath — how the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, and how it was always right to do good on the Sabbath.

April Eighth

I think we do incalculable harm by separating Jesus so completely from the more homely, commonplace affairs of our daily lives. If we had a more adequate account of his discourses with the people and his associations with the people, we would perhaps find that he was not, after all, so busy in saving the world that he didn't have time for the simple, homely enjoyments and affairs of the everyday life. The little glimpses that we have of him along these lines indicate to me that he had. Unless we get his truths right into this phase of our lives, the chances are that we will miss them entirely.

And I think that with all his earnestness, Jesus must have had an unusually keen sense of humour. With his unusual perceptions and his unusual powers in reading and in understanding human nature, it could not be otherwise. That he had a keen sense for beauty; that he saw it, that he valued it, that he loved it, especially beauty in all nature, many of his discourses so abundantly prove. Religion with him was not divorced from life. It was the power that permeated every thought and every act of the daily life.

April Ninth

What one lives in his invisible thought world he is continually actualizing in his visible material world. If he would have any conditions different in the latter, he must make the necessary changes in the former.

April Tenth

If we would seek the essence of Jesus' revelation, attested both by his words and his life, it was to bring a knowledge of the ineffable love of God to man, and by revealing this, to instil in the minds and hearts of men love for God, and a knowledge of and following of the ways of God. It was also then to bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of love — the love of man for man. Combined, it results, so to speak, in raising men to a higher power, to a higher life, — as individuals, as groups, as one great world group.

It is a newly sensitized attitude of mind and heart that he brought and that he endeavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty — a following not of the traditions of men, but fidelity to one's God, whereby the Divine rule in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and as must inevitably follow, fidelity to one's fellowmen. These are the essentials of Jesus' revelation — the fundamental forces in his own life. His every teaching, his every act, comes back to them. I believe also that all efforts to mystify the minds of men and women by later theories about him are contrary to his own expressed teaching, and in exact degree that they would seek to substitute other things for these fundamentals.

April Eleventh

And what a basis as a test of character is this twofold injunction — this great fundamental of Jesus! All religion that is genuine flowers in character. It was Benjamin Jowett who said, and most truly: "The value of a religion is the ethical dividend that it pays." When the heart is right towards God we have the basis, the essence of religion — the consciousness of God in the soul of man. We have truth in the inward parts. When the heart is right towards the fellowman, we have the essential basis of ethics; for again we have truth in the inward parts.

Out of the heart are the issues of life. When the heart is right all outward acts and relations are right. Love draws one to the very heart of God; and love attunes one to all the highest and most valued relationships in our human life.

Fear can never be a basis of either religion or ethics. The one who is moved by fear makes his chief concern the avoidance of detection on the one hand, or the escape of punishment on the other.

April Twelfth

Would you remain young, and would you carry all the joyousness and buoyancy of youth into your maturer years? Then have care concerning but one thing, — how you live in your thought world.

April Thirteenth

It was Emerson, who said: "I believe in the still, small voice, and that voice is the Christ within me." It was he of whom the famous Father Taylor in Boston said: "It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain: he will change the climate there and emigration will set that way."

So thought Jefferson, who said: "I have sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men." And as he, great prophet, with his own hand penned that immortal document — the Declaration of American Independence — one can almost imagine the Galilean prophet standing at his shoulder and saying: Thomas, I think it well to write it so.

Both had a burning indignation for that species of self-seeking either on the part of an individual or an organization that would seek to enchain the minds and thereby the lives of men and women, and even lay claim to their children. Yet Jefferson in his time was frequently called an atheist — and merely because men in those days did not distinguish as clearly as we do today between ecclesiasticism and religion, between formulated and essential Christianity.

April Fourteenth

All aspiring, all thinking, forward-looking men and women of our day are not interested any more in theories about, explanations of, or dogmas about Jesus. They are being won and enthralled by the wonderful personality and life of Jesus. They are being gripped by the power of his teachings. They do not want theories about God — they want God — and God is what Jesus brought — God as the moving, the predominating, the all-embracing force in the individual life. But he who finds the Kingdom of God, whose life becomes subject to the Divine rule and life within, realizes at once also his true relations with the whole — with his neighbour, his fellowmen.

He realizes that his neighbour is not merely the man next door, the man around the corner, or even the man in the next town or city; but that his neighbour is every man and every woman in the world — because all children of the same infinite Father, all bound in the same direction, but over many different roads.

April Fifteenth

Our prevailing thought forces determine the mental atmosphere we create around us, and all who come within its influence are affected in one way or another, according to the quality of that atmosphere.

April Sixteenth

The man who has come under the influence and the domination of the Divine rule, realizes that his interests lie in the same direction as the interests of all, that he cannot gain for himself any good — that is, any essential good — at the expense of the good of all; but rather that his interests, his welfare, and the interests and the welfare of all others are identical.

God's rule, the Divine rule, becomes for him, therefore, the fundamental rule in the business world, the dominating rule in political life and action, the dominating rule in the law and relations of nations.

April Seventeenth

There is a splendid body of young men and young women numbering into untold thousands, who are being captured by the personality and the simple direct message of Jesus. Many of these have caught his spirit and are going off into other lines of the Master's service. They are doing effective and telling work there. Remember that when the spirit of the Christ seizes a man, it is through the channel of present-day forms and present-day terms, not in those fifteen hundred, or sixteen hundred, or even three hundred years ago.

There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that prevents many men and women from subscribing to anything to which they cannot give their intellectual assent, as well as their moral and spiritual assent. They do not object to creeds. They know that a creed is but a statement, a statement of a man's or a woman's belief, whether it be in connection with religion, or in connection with anything else. But what they do object to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on credulity, that is therefore destructive of the intellectual and the moral life of every man and every woman who allows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them, that can be held to if one is at all honest and given to thought, only through intellectual chicanery.

April Eighteenth

We must not forget also that God is still at work, revealing Himself more fully to mankind through modern prophets, through modern agencies. His revelation is not closed. It is still going on. The silly presumption in the statement therefore — "the truth once delivered."

It is well occasionally to call to mind these words by Robert Burns, singing free and with an untrammelled mind and soul from his heather-covered hills.

Here's freedom to him that wad read,

Here's freedom to him that wad write;

There is none ever feared that the truth should be heared

But them that the truth wad indict.

It is essential to remember that we are in possession of knowledge, that we are face to face with conditions that are different from any in the previous history of Christendom. The Christian church must be sure that it moves fast enough so as not to alienate, but to draw into it that great body of intellectually alive, intellectually honest young men and women who have the Christ spirit of service and who are mastered by a great purpose of accomplishment. Remember that these young men and women are now merely standing where the entire church will stand in a few years. Remember that any man or woman who has the true spirit of service has the spirit of Christ — and more, has the religion of the Christ.

April Nineteenth

Be true to the highest within your own soul, and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary manmade rules that are not founded upon principle.

April Twentieth

When the mental beauties of life, when the spiritual verities are sacrificed by self-surrender to and domination by the material, one of the heavy penalties that inexorable law imposes is the drying up, so to speak, of the finer human perceptions — the very faculties of enjoyment. It presents to the world many times, and all unconscious to himself, a stunted, shrivelled human being — that eternal type that the Master had in mind when he said: "Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee."

He whose sole employment or even whose primary employment becomes the building of bigger and still bigger barns to take care of his accumulated grain, becomes incapable of realizing that life and the things that pertain to it are of infinitely more value than barns, or houses, or acres, or stocks, or bonds, or railroad ties. These all have their place; all are of value; but they can never be made the life.

April Twenty-first

One of the great secrets of all successful living is unquestionably the striking of the right balance in life. The material has its place — and a very important place. Fools indeed were we to ignore or to attempt to ignore this fact. We cannot, however, except to our detriment, put the cart before the horse.

Things may contribute to happiness, but things cannot bring happiness — and sad indeed, and crippled and dwarfed and stunted becomes the life of everyone who is not capable of realizing this fact. Eternally true indeed is it that the life is more than meat and the body more than raiment.

April Twenty-second

The injunction that Jesus gave in regard to prayer is unquestionably the method that he found so effective and that he himself used. How many times we are told that he withdrew to the mountain for his quiet period, for communion with the Father, that the realization of his oneness with God might be preserved intact. In this continual realization — I and my Father are one — lay his unusual insight and power. And his distinct statement which he made in speaking of his own powers — as I am ye shall be — shows clearly the possibilities of human unfoldment and attainment, since he realized and lived and then revealed the way.

Were not this Divine source of wisdom and power the heritage of every human soul, distinctly untrue then would be Jesus' saying: "For everyone that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened." Infinitely better is it to know that one has this inner source of guidance and wisdom which as he opens himself to it becomes continually more distinct, more clear and more unerring in its guidance, than to be continually seeking advice from outside sources, and being confused in regard to the advice given. This is unquestionably the way of the natural and the normal life, made so simple and so plain by Jesus.

April Twenty-third

Not that problems and trials will not come. They will come. There never has been and there never will be a life free from them. Life isn't conceivable on any other terms. But the wonderful source of consolation and strength, the source that gives freedom from worry and freedom from fear is the realization of the fact that the guiding force and the moulding power is within us. It becomes active and controlling in the degree that we realize and in the degree that we are able to open ourselves so that the Divine intelligence and power can speak to and can work through us.

To establish one's centre aright is to make all of life's activities and events and results flow from this centre in orderly sequence. A modern writer of great insight has said: "The understanding that God is, and all there is, will establish you upon a foundation from which you can never be moved." To know that the power that is God is the power that works in us is knowledge of transcendent import.

April Twenty-fourth

The simple message of the Christ, with its twofold injunction of Love, is, when sufficiently understood and sufficiently heeded, all that we men of earth need to lift up, to beautify, to make strong and Godlike individual lives and thereby and of necessity the life of the world.

He then pleaded with all the energy and love and fervour of his splendid heart and vigorous manhood that all men should follow the Way that he revealed and realize their Divine Sonship, that their lives might be redeemed — redeemed from the bondage of the bodily senses and the bondage of merely the things of the outer world, and saved as fit subjects of and workers in the Father's Kingdom. Otherwise for millions of splendid earnest men and women today his life-message would have no meaning.

To make men awake to their real identity, and therefore to their possibilities and powers as true sons of God, the Father of all, and therefore that all men are brothers — for otherwise God is not Father of all — and to live together in brotherly love and mutual cooperation whereby the Divine will becomes done on earth as it is in heaven — this is his message to we men of earth. If we believe his message and accept his leadership, then he becomes indeed our elder brother who leads the way, the Word in us becomes flesh, the Christ becomes enthroned in our lives, — and we become co-workers with him in the Father's vineyard.

April Twenty-fifth

The cheerful, confident, tranquil in all circumstances, are continually growing in these same qualities, for the mind grows by and in the direction of that which it feeds upon. This process of mental chemistry is continually working in our lives, bringing us desirable or undesirable conditions according to our prevailing mental states.

This attitude of mind is the one also that carries us through when the dark day comes and things look their worst. It enables us to take the "long view," to throw the thought on beyond the present-day difficulty or depression to the time when it will have worked itself out all well and good. Such times come to all. We must be brave and bravely take our share.

April Twenty-sixth

One can never do an act of kindly service for another without in the very act of doing it reaping a corresponding benefit for oneself. It is not the professional good-doing, for that many times becomes self-conscious, conceited, even self-seeking. It is rather setting the heart aright and keeping the mind open always to seize the opportunity to do the kindly service whenever the need is known, wherever the opportunity presents itself.

There is also a great law of indirectness that operates here. It is this: Whenever we do an act of kindly service for another, forgetful of and with no thought of self or gain, many times it does us more good than the one we do it for. The life is broadened, ennobled, expanded, lifted out of and above the dwarfed and the stunted of the commonplace. So in the last analysis it resolves itself into the formula: We find our own lives in losing them in the larger human service. Why? Eternal Laws have so decreed.

April Twenty-seventh

Meet hatred with hatred and you degrade yourself. Meet hatred with love and you elevate not only yourself but also the one who bears you hatred.

April Twenty-eighth

The companionship of those whose minds are alive, forward-looking, working, growing, whose hearts beat and keep right, who know the value of faith and hope and courage, for these induce energy and power, is one of the greatest helps and therefore assets that anyone can avail himself or herself of. To seek and to cultivate such companionship is a boon to any life. It has lifted myriads of lives out of the stagnant and dead level of the commonplace.

April Twenty-ninth

Love, sympathy, good-will, and the cynicism. kindly deed that is always ready and on tap, is what expands, multiplies and beautifies life. Hatred, ill-will, self-seeking, envy, and jealousy is what dwarfs and stultifies. How instinctively all men and women are drawn to and seek the company of those whose lives are dominated by the former. How instinctively they shun and even despise the company of those who are embodiments of the latter. And this of itself speaks volumes as to which is the right or the wrong approach to life.

April Thirtieth

The habit of taking a little time daily alone in the quiet, in communion with one's Source, that the illumination and guidance of the Holy Spirit may become alive and active in the life, and going then about one's daily work ever open to and conscious of this Divine guidance, strengthened and sustained always by this Divine power, will bring definiteness and direction, will bring hope and courage, and peace and power to everyone who will heed the Master's injunction and will follow His example. These it has brought to great numbers to whom before life was an enigma; and this because the life had been lived entirely from the outside.

The higher forces and powers of the inner life, those of the mind and spirit, always potential within, become of actual value only as they are recognized, realized, and used.

The Master's Way of the Spirit, the finding of the Kingdom within, leads into no blind alley. It leads out and triumphantly out onto the great plain of clear vision, of unself-centred activity, of heroic endeavour and accomplishment.

May

May First

There is a great law in connection with the coming of truth. It is this: Whenever a man or a woman shuts himself or herself to the entrance of truth on account of intellectual pride, preconceived opinions, prejudices, or for whatever reason, there is a great law which says that truth in its fulness will come to that one from no source.

And on the other hand, when a man or a woman opens himself or herself fully to the entrance of truth from whatever source it may come, there is an equally great law which says that truth will flow into him or to her from all sources, from all quarters. Such becomes the free man, the free woman, for it is the truth that makes us free. The other remains in bondage, for truth has had no invitation and will not enter where it is not fully and freely welcomed.

May Second

Where truth is denied entrance the rich blessings it carries with it cannot take up their abode. On the contrary, when this is the case, it sends an envoy carrying with it atrophy, disease, death, physically and spiritually as well as intellectually. And the man who would rob another of his free and unfettered search for truth, who would stand as the interpreter of truth for another, with the intent of remaining in this position, rather than endeavouring to lead him to the place where he can be his own interpreter, is more to be shunned than a thief and a robber. The injury he works is far greater, for he is doing direct and positive injury to the very life of the one he thus holds.

May Third

To love and to hold reverence for all people and all things, but to stand in awe or fear of nothing save our own wrong-doing.

May Fourth

Wise are we if we do not allow any one thing, little or big, or still bigger, to disappoint or to cloud or sour our lives and thereby to neutralize our energies, or even our hopes or our ambitions.

May Fifth

To take and to live always in the attitude of mind that compels gladness, looking for and thus drawing to us continually the best in all people and all things, being thereby the creators of our own good fortunes.

May Sixth

Fear and lack of faith go hand in hand. The one is born of the other. Tell me how much one is given to fear, and I will tell you how much he lacks in faith. Fear is a most expensive guest to entertain, the same as worry is; so expensive are they that no one can afford to entertain them. We invite what we fear, the same as, by a different attitude of mind, we invite and attract the influences and conditions we desire. The mind dominated by fear opens the door for the entrance of the very things, for the actualization of the very conditions it fears.

"Where are you going?" asked an Eastern pilgrim on meeting the plague one day. "I am going to Bagdad to kill five thousand people," was the reply. A few days later the same pilgrim met the plague returning. "You told me you were going to Bagdad to kill five thousand people," said he, "but instead, you killed fifty thousand." "No," said the plague, "I killed only five thousand, as I told you I would; the others died of fright."

Fear can paralyse every muscle in the body. Fear affects the flow of the blood, likewise the normal and healthy action of all the life forces. Fear can make the body rigid, motionless, and powerless to move.

May Seventh

He who has the quest of the good in his heart relates himself thereby with all the higher powers and forces of the universe and they aid him at every turn.

May Eighth

It was Fenelon who said: "If the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love for reading, I would spurn them all."

Of equal significance is the thought of Channing: "Books are the true levellers. They give to all who faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best of our race." So great are our opportunities in this regard today, and yet so apt are we on account of the urge of so many things in connection with our modern life, to neglect them, that it is well to have recalled to us these thoughts of earlier men; for the best is now within the reach of every man, woman, and child.

May Ninth

Our love, our service, our helpfulness to others, invariably comes back to us, intensified sometimes a hundred or a thousand or a thousand, thousand-fold, and this by a great, immutable law.

May Tenth

Thought is the great builder in human life: it is the determining factor. Continually think thoughts that are good, and your life will show forth in goodness, and your body in health and beauty. Continually think evil oughts, and your life will show forth in evil, and your body in weakness and repulsiveness. Think thoughts of love, and you will love and will be loved. Think thoughts of hatred, and you will hate and will be hated. Each follows its kind.

May Eleventh

We need changes from the duties and the cares of our accustomed everyday life. They are necessary for healthy, normal living. We need occasionally to be away from our friends, our relatives, from the members of our immediate households. Such changes are good for us; they are good for them. We appreciate them better, they us, when we are away from them for a period, or they from us.

We need these changes to get the kinks out of our minds, our nerves, our muscles — the cobwebs off our faces. We need them to whet again the edge of appetite. We need them to invite the mind and the soul to new possibilities and powers. We need them in order to come back with new implements, or with implements redressed, sharpened, for the daily duties.

We need periods of being by ourselves — alone. Sometimes a fortnight or even a week will do wonders for one, unless he or she has drawn too heavily upon the account. The simple custom, moreover, of taking an hour, or even a half hour, alone in the quiet, in the midst of the daily routine of life, would be the source of inestimable gain for countless numbers.

May Twelfth

Peace lies not in the external world. It lies within one's own soul. We may travel over many different avenues in pursuit of it, we may seek it through the channels of the bodily appetites and passions, we may seek it through all the channels of the external, we may chase for it hither and thither, but it will always be just beyond our grasp, because we are searching for it where it is not.

In the degree, however, that we order the bodily appetites and passions in accordance with the promptings of the soul within will the higher forms of happiness and peace enter our lives; but in the degree that we fail in doing this will disease, suffering, and discontent enter in.

May Thirteenth

If we have faith, if we have patience and perseverance, there is no condition, no experience that rightly viewed and rightly turned and used will not bring us stores of good.

May Fourteenth

The chief characteristic of the gossip is that he or she prefers to live in the low-lying miasmic strata of life, revelling in the negatives of life and taking joy in finding and peddling about the findings that he or she naturally makes there.

May Fifteenth

It rests upon each one to decide whether he or she will become a master or a creature of circumstances. It depends upon the direction in which one sets his face, and how persistently he then follows the road upon which he enters. The facing in the right direction is the main thing.

If then, we have backbone and stamina and a fair degree of good cheer, which if persisted in will lead in time to a persistently merry heart all along the way, there can be but one outcome.

May Sixteenth

There is nothing by way of habit, character, even achievement that can get into a man's or a woman's life except through the avenue of his or her mental life. Search as carefully and as critically as we will, we will find no exceptions to this rule.

May Seventeenth

The amount of cream that appears in our lives depends, after all, more upon those types of thoughts that we choose and live most habitually with than upon anything else. These are our private property, and it is ours to regulate them as we will.

May Eighteenth

An old French proverb runs:

"Some of your griefs you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of pain you endured

From evils that never arrived."

Fear and lack of faith go hand in hand. The one is born of the other. Tell me how much one is given to fear, and I will tell you how much he lacks in faith. Fear is a most expensive guest to entertain, the same as worry is; so expensive are they that no one can afford to entertain them. We invite what we fear, the same as, by a different attitude of mind, we invite and attract the influences and conditions we desire.

May Nineteenth

As anger inspires anger, as love and sympathy inspire love and sympathy in others, each of its kind, so cheerfulness and happiness inspire the same in others.

May Twentieth

Never give a moment to complaint, but utilize the time that would otherwise be spent in this way in looking forward and actualizing the conditions you desire. Suggest prosperity to yourself. See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition. Affirm it calmly and quietly, but strongly and confidently. Believe it, believe it absolutely. Expect it, — keep it continually watered with expectation. You thus make yourself a magnet to attract the things that you desire.

May Twenty-first

God never made any man or any institution a dispenser of truth or the custodian of the mental life of another. He instituted laws and forces whereby one man by ordering his life in accordance with the highest laws and forces of his being, living so to speak in the upper stories of his being, has become the revealer of truth and the exemplar of truth to other men.

In the degree, however, that he has been worthy of receiving and successful in living, and thus in transmitting such revelations, in that degree has he kept his own personality in the background in order that the truth might be free from encumbrances now and from encrustations by and by. In other words, in the degree that he has loved truth more and self or self-aggrandizement less has he lost sight of himself in order that the truth might be unencumbered and freely and effectively delivered.

To hold undue reverence for or to stand in awe or fear of another is an exhibition, though perchance unconscious, of a lack of faith in or a degradation of our own native powers and forces, which if rightly unfolded and used might open to us revelations and lead us to heights even beyond those of the one we mentally crouch before.

May Twenty-second

All the frictions, all the uncertainties, all the ills, the sufferings, the fears, the forebodings, the perplexities of life come to us because we are out of harmony with the divine order of things. They will continue to come as long as we so live. Rowing against the tide is hard and uncertain. To go with the tide and thus to take advantage of the working of a great natural force is safe and easy.

May Twenty-third

By example and not by precept. By living, not by preaching. By doing, not by professing. By living the life, not by dogmatizing as to how it should be lived.

May Twenty-fourth

If one hold himself in the thought of poverty, he will be poor, and the chances are that he will remain in poverty. If he hold himself, whatever present conditions may be, continually in the thought of prosperity, he sets into operation forces that will sooner or later bring him into prosperous conditions.

May Twenty-fifth

The starting point of habit-forming, character-building, in fact of everything that is desirable or undesirable in life, is thought. Our every act — if we will look deeply enough — is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms in time the habit, the sum of one's habits determines and stamps his character, which means always, life, destiny. So we have it, — thought on the one hand, life, destiny, on the other.

The thing to remember is that the thought is always parent to the act. There gets into our lives by way of habit exactly what we allow to get into it — and never more, never less. We are the designers and builders of our own fortunes or ill-fortunes, whatever we may at times think to the contrary.

May Twenty-sixth

It is a simple psychological law that any type of thought if persisted in for a sufficient length of time, will finally reach the motor tracks of the brain and burst forth into action. One's thoughts, his prevailing mental, and through them emotional states, are always the antecedents and the causes of his acts. There is scarcely an inmate of any of our prisons, or penal institutions of whatever type, today — man or woman — who has not gotten there through the operation of this law. Our thoughts determine our acts and therefore our lives, as well as the influences of our lives upon all about us, either by way of good or by way of hindrance, with absolute precision.

May Twenty-seventh

The true psychological fact is that we have it in our power to determine the types of thoughts, and the very thoughts, we entertain. Here let us refer to that law of the mind, which is in the main, the same as is the law in connection with the reflex nerve system of the body. In substance it is this: Whenever we do a certain thing in a certain way, it is just a little easier to do it in the same way the next time, and still a little easier the next, and the next, until the time comes when it no longer requires an effort — it does itself so to speak, and to do otherwise would require the effort.

Here in a nutshell is the modus operandi of thought control, of mind mastery, of habit-forming, of character-building. It is not, one must freely admit, always easy at first — many times it is extremely difficult; but the law is accurate and absolute, and it will give us always the inevitable result if we grasp it and apply it.

May Twenty-eighth

We have then, the power of determining the thoughts we entertain — the thoughts that are invariably the determiners of every act and eventually of every habit; and if there is difficulty at first — even exceeding great difficulty — we can avail ourselves of the law that will make this control continually easier.

The one thing then to do, is to stand master at the helm of thought, and the act and the habit will take care of themselves. It is simply cause-effect. In this way and this way alone one's entire character is either formed or is remade. The consequence — the result — is a matter of tremendous importance, while the method, or rather, the law of its accomplishment, is one of extreme simplicity.

May Twenty-ninth

In the matter of breaking away from a habit already formed, especially if one is for the time being under the domination, as we say, of that habit, — mental or physical — it is many times very difficult to keep the thought or the recurrence of the thought out of the mind. The one safe rule of action, or the course of action that makes the accomplishment easier is, as quickly as the undesirable thought presents itself to put it out of the mind instantly; dalliance with it, and thereby allowing it to assume larger proportions makes it continually harder to check it.

That which at first is but a tiny flame, will grow if we act too tardily, into one of consuming proportions; and we will find ourselves under its domination again.

May Thirtieth

While it is true that we should get away from self-condemnation, it does not follow that we should get away from self-examination. Life is no mere child's-play, no mere long holiday, if we would build character and live lives worthy of the ideals of normal men and women, worthy of our day and generation, worthy of the admiration and esteem of friends and neighbours, lives that will bring us their richest returns as well as make us of greatest service to friend and neighbour, and to the stranger who continually crosses our path.

Frequent self-examination is wise that we may check ourselves, or unfold and develop ourselves, along the lines of our greatest needs. We all have our faults, our failings, our undesirable tendencies, and our undesirable habits, the same as we have our good points. The former we can push out of our lives — and along with them the losses they would inevitably bring us — only by an alertness, by a certain quality of virility or of womanliness, that makes us, as we sometimes say, sit up and think, and then, get up and do.

So many times we lose the good we would attain by fearing to attempt, or through our sloth in not summoning up energy and initiative sufficient to begin. It was Goethe who said:

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute:

What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Only begin and then the mind grows heated;

Begin and then the work will be completed.

May Thirty-first

There is no such thing as Fate in the sense of something being fixed and thrown upon us from without. We decide our own Fate when we decide what order of thoughts we allow entrance into and a dominating influence in our lives. Each decides for himself his own destiny whatever anyone may say to the contrary. It was Emerson who said: "Deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt always drag her after thee."

June

June First

Those who have gone after, or primarily after, the mere accessories of life, in distinction from or to the detriment of the life itself — the things of the mind and the spirit — and the things therefore of eternal value, have come back with the keenest of disappointments.

June Second

I have unbounded sympathy — through the channel of my memory — for the one who is struggling to be free from any undesirable habit. So must every one of us if his memory isn't too short, and if he be honest with himself. But if one inadvertently is under the domination of any habit, this struggling is good — good for himself and good for others — in that it will give him in turn that royal quality of sympathy.

When we are able actually to place ourselves in the other fellow's place, we are then really capable of this kingly quality. We are then also wiser and more useful because of our wider viewpoint. We are then slow, exceedingly slow, to judge another, and never fool or knave enough to condemn. In our present state of incompleteness, and not knowing the great and heroic struggles that may be going on and that for him eventually undoubtedly will win, we will give that same time to occasional self-examination and to living more worthily ourselves. in the world.

June Third

It is the man or the woman of faith, and hence of courage, who is the master of circumstances, and who makes his or her power felt.

June Fourth

Growth through discipline is one of the great facts of life. Unquestionably Henry Drummond was right when he said: "Sooner or later we find out that life is not a holiday, but discipline. Earlier or later we all discover that the world is not a playground. It is quite clear God means it for a school. The moment we forget that, the puzzle of life begins." And although he was right, who shall say other than that we should be always as happy as we can be, while the school keeps.

June Fifth

To make the best of present conditions, to form and clearly see one's ideal, though it may seem distant and almost impossible, to believe in it, and to believe in one's ability to actualize it — this is the first essential of all real attainment.

June Sixth

Wise is he who determines early to do away with the companionship of the two great filchers of the best there is in life. To determine resolutely to bid goodbye to fear and worry, opening all doors and windows to hope, and faith, and courage, and then coupling with this rightly directed effort, will work a complete revolution in any life. To take the attitude of cheerfulness, looking always on the bright side of things, determined to hold oneself always in an optimistic, never-down-in-the-mouth, but courage-always-up attitude of mind and heart, is to set into operation those silent, subtle forces that will be working continually along the lines we are going.

It is not therefore, What are the conditions in any life? — but how one meets the conditions that are found there that determines his real stamina and worth, and that determines his real success or failure.

June Seventh

Someone has said: "The first step toward happiness is to determine to be happy." To get up each morning determined to be happy, to take anew this attitude of mind whenever the dark or doleful thought presents itself, is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. It is thus that we condition circumstances instead of allowing ourselves to be conditioned by them.

June Eighth

There is one thing we can always rest assured of — the prevailing mental states and emotions at thirty-five and forty-five will have stamped their influences and will have determined the prevailing conditions in any life at fifty-five and sixty-five. The only way to come into a happy, well-balanced, and therefore joyous and welcome old age, is to come to it through the avenues of the right mental habits of youth and middle age.

June Ninth

The whole of human life is cause and effect; there is no such thing in it as chance, nor is there even in all the wide universe. Are we not satisfied with whatever comes into our lives? The thing to do, then, is not to spend time in railing against the imaginary something we create and call fate, but to look to the within, and change the causes at work there, in order that things of a different nature may come, for there will come exactly what we cause to come.

June Tenth

The day is the unit of life. A writer of keen insight has said: "Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, till nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down — and this is all that life ever really means."

Life is not so complex if we do not persist in making it so. We can simplify it a great deal more than we do. Emerson undoubtedly had this in mind when he said: "Just to fill the hour — that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this, 'Behold, also, an hour of my life is gone' — but rather, 'I have lived an hour.'"

June Eleventh

We can be men and women of power or we can be men and women of impotence. The moment one vitally grasps the fact that he, can rise he will rise, and he can have absolutely no limitations other than the limitations he sets to himself. Cream always rises to the top. It rises simply because it is the nature of cream to rise.

June Twelfth

Faith, absolute dogmatic faith, is the final law of true success. When we recognize the fact that a man carries his success or his failure with him, and that it does not depend upon outside conditions, we will come into the possession of powers that will quickly change outside conditions into agencies that make for success.

June Thirteenth

A friend who knows the power of the interior forces, and whose life is guided in every detail by them, has given a suggestion in this form: When you are in the arms of the bear, even though he is hugging you, look him in the face and laugh, but all the time keep your eye on the bull.

If you allow all of your attention to be given to the work of the bear, the bull may get entirely out of your sight. In other words, if you yield to adversity the chances are that it will master you, but if you recognize in yourself the power of mastery over conditions then adversity will yield to you, and will be changed into prosperity. If when it comes you calmly and quietly recognize it, and use the time that might otherwise be spent in regrets, and fears, and forebodings, in setting into operation the powerful forces within you, it will soon take its leave.

June Fourteenth

A knowledge of the Spiritual Power working in and through us as well as in and through all things, a power that works for righteousness, leads to optimism. Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power. There is nothing firmer, and safer, and surer than Deity. Then, as we recognize the fact that we have it in our own hands to open ourselves ever more fully to this Infinite Power, and call upon it to manifest itself in and through us, we will find in ourselves an ever increasing sense of power.

June Fifteenth

God give us more of the people who set about definitely and actively to cultivate the habit of happiness, people the corners of whose mouths are turned chronically up and not down, people who are looking for and who are inspiring and calling forth the best from all. The disagreeable things that fill such a large portion of the lives of many, seldom it seems, present themselves to those of this trend of mind and heart.

There are people who, when they go into an orchard, seem to have the faculty of finding chiefly the little, the gnarled, even the partly decayed specimens of fruit. Others go in even on the same day and under the same trees, and seem to have the faculty of finding splendid, beautifully developed and beautifully coloured specimens. It is true after all that in life and in people we find mostly that that we are looking for.

June Sixteenth

Life is not for mere passing pleasure, but for the highest unfoldment that one can attain to, the noblest character that one can grow, and for the greatest service that one can render to all mankind. In this, however, we will find the highest pleasure, for in this the only real pleasure lies.

He who would find it by any short cuts, or by entering upon any other paths, will inevitably find that his last state is always worse than his first; and if he proceed upon paths other than these, he will find that he will never find real and lasting pleasure at all.

June Seventeenth

When we come fully to realize the great fact that all evil and error and sin with all their consequent sufferings come through ignorance, then wherever we see a manifestation of these in whatever form, if our hearts are right, we will have compassion, sympathy and compassion for the one in whom we see them. Compassion will then change itself into love, and love will manifest itself in kindly service. Such is the divine method.

June Eighteenth

Anyone — a fool or an idiot— can be exclusive. It comes easy. It takes and it signifies a large nature to be universal, to be inclusive.

Only the man or the woman of a small, personal, self-centred, self-seeking nature is exclusive. The man or the woman of a large, royal, unself-centred nature never is. The small nature is the one that continually strives for effect. The larger nature never does.

June Nineteenth

Here is a lesson I have learned: whatever conditions are in my life today that are not the easiest and most agreeable, and whatever conditions of this type all coming time may bring, I will take them just as they come, without complaint, without depression, and meet them in the wisest possible way; knowing that they are the best possible conditions that could be in my life at the time, or otherwise they would not be there; realizing the fact that, although I may not at the time see why they are in my life, although I may not see just what part they have to play, the time will come, and when it comes I will see it all, and thank God for every condition just as it came.

Everything that comes into each life has its place and its purpose, its part to play, and were it not necessary or were it not good in the long run that it come it would not come.

June Twentieth

In order that we may get some greater evidences of certainty of what Jesus' primal or fundamental teaching was, upon which he was desirous that everything else rest, let us note the following. One day when he was teaching a group around him, numerous questions were asked him. We are told that then a certain lawyer arose. A lawyer was a scribe, or an interpreter and teacher of the Ecclesiastical Law and observances. His question was: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." How truly fundamental this becomes of Jesus' purpose, mission, and teachings when coupled with the announcement: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."

The Fatherhood of God means, according to Jesus' teachings, the Divine Sonship of man, and from the Sonship flows the inevitable Brotherhood.

June Twenty-first

Lincoln, who was unquestionably one of the most profoundly religious men our country has known, one of the greatest of Christians, although a member of no church, on being asked why he did not unite with some church organization, replied: "Because I find difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the complicated statements of Christian doctrine which constitute their articles of belief and confessions of faith.

"When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification of membership, the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both law and gospel: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself, that church shall I join with all my heart and soul."

"On religious matters he thought deeply," says Lamon, his friend and biographer, "and his opinions were positive. He was by nature religious, full of religious sentiment. He had a sagacity almost instinctive in sifting the false from the true. He was ever seeking the right, the real, and the true."

June Twenty-second

The best feature of many of the troubles we are prone to worry about is the fact that most of them never come. It was Lowell who said: "Let us be of good cheer, remember the misfortunes hardest to bear are those that never come."

The one who allows himself to be dominated by neither fears nor forebodings, who does not allow his energies to be crippled thereby, and who gives no place to their corroding and poisoning influences, puts himself in that positive attitude of mind that seems to neutralize the disagreeable influences before they can touch him; and on the other hand he attracts to himself, through the great law of the drawing power of mind, which is that like attracts like, the influences and conditions he most desires.

June Twenty-third

The moment that we come into a realization of our true selves, and so of the tremendous powers and forces within, — the powers and the mind and spirit, — hereditary traits and influences that are harmful in nature will begin to lessen, and will disappear with a rapidity directly in proportion to the completeness of this realization.

June Twenty-fourth

It is the man or the woman of faith, and hence of courage, who is the master of circumstances, and who makes his or her power felt in the world. It is the man or the woman who lacks faith and who as a consequence is weakened and crippled by fears and forebodings, who is the creature of all passing occurrences.

June Twenty-fifth

Not repression, but elevation. A knowledge of the spiritual realities of life prohibits asceticism, repression, the same as it prohibits license and perverted use. To err on the one side is just as contrary to the ideal life as to err on the other. All things are for a purpose, all should be used and enjoyed; but all should be rightly used, that they may be fully enjoyed.

It is the all-around, fully developed we want, — not the ethereal, pale-blooded man and woman, but the man and woman of flesh and blood, for action and service here and now, — the man and woman strong and powerful, with all the faculties and functions fully unfolded and used, all in a royal and bounding condition, but all rightly subordinated. The man and the woman of this kind, with the imperial hand of mastery upon all, — standing, moving thus like a king, nay, like a very God, — such is the man and such is the woman of power. Such is the ideal life: anything else is one-sided, and falls short of it.

June Twenty-sixth

By example and not by precept. By living, not by preaching. By doing, not by professing. By living the life, not by dogmatizing as to how it should be lived. There is no contagion equal to the contagion of life. Whatever we sow, that shall we also reap, and each thing sown produces of its kind. We can kill not only by doing another bodily injury directly, but we can and we do kill by every antagonistic thought. Not only do we thus kill, but while we kill, we suicide. Many a man has been made sick by having the ill thoughts of a number of people centred upon him; some have been actually killed. Put hatred into the world and we make it a literal hell. Put love into the world and heaven with all its beauties and glories becomes a reality.

Not to love is not to live, or it is to live a living death. The life that goes out in love to all is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power. Such is the life that becomes ever more inclusive, and hence larger in its scope and influence.

June Twenty-seventh

Self-condemnation with its allied thoughts and emotions has been productive of a far greater loss in initiative, in will-power, and of a far greater degree of lowered vitality, both mental and physical, than any of us have perhaps realized.

June Twenty-eighth

In the degree that we love will we be loved. Thoughts are forces and each creates of its kind. Each comes back laden with the effect that corresponds to itself and of which it is the cause.

"Then let your secret thoughts be fair —

They have a vital part, and share

In shaping words and moulding fate;

God's system is so intricate."

If our heart goes out in love to all with whom we come in contact, we inspire love and the same ennobling and warming influences of love always return to us from those in whom we inspire them. There is a deep scientific principle underlying the precept — If you would have all the world love you, you must first love all the world.

June Twenty-ninth

Fear paralyses healthy action, mental and physical. Worry corrodes, poisons and pulls down the organism. It is a perverted mental state that externalizes itself in various physical ailments according to the peculiar tendencies or weaknesses of the one in whose organism its effects find lodgement.

June Thirtieth

Will is the steady directing power: it is concentration. It is the pilot which, after the vessel is started by the mighty force within, puts it on its right course and keeps it true to that course. Will is the sun-glass which so concentrates and so focuses the sun's rays that they quickly burn a hole through the paper that is held before it. The same rays, not thus concentrated, not thus focused, would fall upon the paper for days without any effect whatever. Will is the means for the directing, the concentrating, the focusing, of the thought-forces.

Thought under wise direction, — this it is that does the work, that brings results, that makes the successful career. One object in mind which we never lose sight of; an ideal steadily held before the mind, never lost sight of, never lowered, never swerved from, — this, with persistence, determines all. Nothing can resist the power of thought, when thus directed by will.

July

July First

In the degree that we work in conjunction with the Supreme Power do we need the less to concern ourselves about results.

July Second

Nothing is more subtle than thought, nothing more powerful, nothing more irresistible in its operations, when rightly applied and held to with a faith and fidelity that is unswerving, — a faith and fidelity that never knows the neutralizing effects of doubt and fear. If one have aspirations and a sincere desire for a higher and better condition, so far as advantages, facilities, associates, or any surroundings or environments are concerned, and if he continually send out his highest thought forces for the realization of these desires, and continually water these forces with firm expectation as to their fulfilment, he will sooner or later find himself in the realization of these desires, and all in accordance with natural laws and forces.

We are born to be neither slaves nor beggars, but to dominion and to plenty. This is our rightful heritage, if we will but recognize and lay claim to it.

July Third

The power of every life, the very life itself, is determined by what it relates itself to. God is immanent as well as transcendent. He is creating, working, ruling in the universe today, in your life and in mine, just as much as He ever has been. We are too apt to regard Him after the manner of an absentee landlord, one who has set in operation the forces of this great universe, and then taken Himself away.

In the degree, however, that we recognize Him as immanent as well as transcendent, are we able to partake of His life and power. For in the degree that we recognize Him as the Infinite Spirit of Life and Power that is today, at this very moment, working and manifesting in and through all, and then, in the degree that we come into the realization of our oneness with this life, do we become partakers of, and so do we actualize in ourselves the qualities of this life. In the degree that we open ourselves to the inflowing tide of this immanent and transcendent life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work.

July Fourth

The most interesting feature of worry, as well as the most astonishing when we examine carefully into it, is the fact that through it nothing is ever to be gained, but on the other hand, everything is to be lost.

July Fifth

“It’s natural for me to worry,” says one, "and I can't help it." The first part of the statement may be true in many cases. Nonsense, should be the reply always to the latter part of it. If you think you can't help it, and if you persist in this thought, the chances are that you can't, and there is perhaps then no hope for you. But take the other thought, take the thought that you can help it, realize once for all that you can and determine that you will, and if you keep your mind true to that idea and to that purpose, it is simply a matter of time until you will have taken yourself entirely out of the class of the “afraids,” the “get-no-wheres.”

July Sixth

A mind always hopeful, confident, courageous, and determined on its set purpose, and keeping itself to that purpose, attracts to itself out of the elements things and powers favourable to that purpose.

July Seventh

Rest we are now finding does not depend necessarily upon a cessation of activities, but sometimes a change of work or activity is fully as effective. It is the time we spend alone that has to do with the great realities of life, and these are the things that after all really count. They, it is, that eventually bring real and lasting satisfaction. To take this quiet period everyday enables us to get hold more and more of those interior, spiritual, thought forces that we can and should infuse into, and mould the conditions of everyday life with. It also aids us to find and to keep our conscious connection with the Infinite Source of life and power that is back of all, working in and through all, in the degree that we open ourselves that it may manifest to and through us.

It is idle for anyone, be she busy homemaker or be he busy man of affairs, to say it is impossible to get this quiet hour or half hour a day. If the desire is really there it can always be accomplished. And for one to say that he or she cannot afford it, is to speak without sufficient knowledge. There is no one when its value is once fully or even partially realized, who can afford to do otherwise.

July Eighth

Ignorance enchains and enslaves. Truth — which is but another way of saying a clear and definite knowledge of Law, the elemental laws of soul, of mind, and body, and of the universe about us — brings freedom. Jesus revealed essentially a spiritual philosophy of life. His whole revelation pertained to the essential divinity of the human soul and the great gains that would follow the realization of this fact. His whole teaching revolved continually around his own expression, used again and again, the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, and which he so distinctly stated was an inner state or consciousness or realization. Something not to be found outside of oneself but to be found only within.

July Ninth

For true worship, only God and the human soul are necessary. It does not depend upon times, or seasons, or occasions.

July Tenth

Happy is the young man or the young woman who, while the bulk of life still lies ahead, realizes that it is the things of the mind and the spirit — the fundamental things in life — that really count; that here lie the forces that are to be understood and to be used in moulding the everyday conditions and affairs of life; that the springs of life are all from within, that as is the inner so always and inevitably will be the outer.

July Eleventh

F one thing we can rest assured; nothing in the universe, nothing in connection with human life is outside of the Realm of Law. The elemental law of Cause and Effect is absolute in its workings. One of the great laws pertaining to human life is: As is the inner, so always and inevitably is the outer — Cause, Effect. Our thoughts and emotions are the silent, subtle forces that are constantly externalizing themselves in kindred forms in our outward material world. Like creates like, and like attracts like. As is our prevailing type of thought, so is our prevailing type and our condition of life.

July Twelfth

The type of thought we entertain has its effect upon our energies and to a great extent upon our bodily conditions and states. Strong, clearcut, positive, hopeful thought has a stimulating and life-giving effect upon one's outlook, energies, and activities, and upon all bodily functions and powers. A falling state of the mind induces a chronically gloomy outlook and produces inevitably a falling condition of the body. The mind grows, moreover, into the likeness of the thoughts one most habitually entertains and lives with. Every thought reproduces of its kind.

July Thirteenth

All the frictions, uncertainties, ills, sufferings, fears, forebodings, and perplexities of life come to us because we are out of harmony with the divine order of things.

July Fourteenth

To establish one's centre aright is to make all of life's activities and events and results flow from this centre in orderly sequence. A modern writer of great insight has said: "The understanding that God is, and all there is, will establish you upon a foundation from which you can never be moved." To know that the power that is God is the power that works in us is knowledge of transcendent import.

To know that the spirit of Infinite wisdom and power which is the creating, the moving, and the sustaining force in all life, thinks and acts in and through us as our own very life, in the degree that we consciously and deliberately desire it to become the guiding and the animating force in our lives, and open ourselves fully to its leadings, and follow its leadings, is to attain to that state of conscious oneness with the Divine that Jesus realized, lived and revealed, and that he taught as the method of the natural and the normal life for all men.

July Fifteenth

Our prevailing thought forces determine the mental atmosphere we create around us, and all who come within its influence are affected in one way or another, according to the quality of that atmosphere.

July Sixteenth

A very general rule with but few exceptions can be laid down as follows: The body ordinarily looks as old as the mind thinks and feels. Shakespeare anticipated by many years the best psychology of the times when he said: "It is the mind that makes the body rich."

It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern, should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, and with undiminished vigour from youth to middle age, and then how to carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal more of the vigour and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do.

July Seventeenth

Mentally to live in any state or attitude of mind is to take that state or condition into the subconscious. The subconscious mind does and always will produce in the body after its own kind. It is through this law that we externalize and become in body what we live in our minds. If we have predominating visions of and harbour thoughts of old age and weakness, this state, with all its attendant circumstances, will become externalized in our bodies far more quickly than if we entertain thoughts and visions of a different type. Said the late Archdeacon Wilberforce in a notable address in Westminster Abbey: "The recent researches of scientific men, endorsed by experiments in the Salpetriere in Paris, have drawn attention to the intensely creative power of suggestions made by the conscious mind to the subconscious mind."

July Eighteenth

The small nature is the one that continually strives for effect. The larger nature never does. The one goes here and there in order to gain recognition, in order to attach himself to the world. The other stays at home and draws the world to him.

July Nineteenth

Tell me how much one loves and I will tell you how much he has seen of God. Tell me how much he loves and I will tell you how much he lives with God. Tell me how much he loves and I will tell you how far into the Kingdom of Heaven, — the kingdom of harmony, he has entered, for "love is the fulfilling of the law." Love inspires love; hatred breeds hatred. Love and goodwill stimulate and build up the body; hatred and malice corrode and tear it down. Love is a savour of life unto life; hatred is a savour of death unto death.

"There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,

There are souls that are pure and true;

Then give to the world the best you have,

And the best will come back to you.

"Give love, and love to your heart will flow,

A strength in your utmost need;

Have faith, and a score of hearts will show

Their faith in your word and deed."

July Twentieth

We concern ourselves habitually with so many things that we really do not have to concern ourselves with. We concern ourselves with so many small matters of mere detail, instead of concerning ourselves primarily with the fundamentals, and allowing the matters of detail to fall in place sort of naturally and of their own accord. The one given to fear or worry concerns himself or herself with a hundred things everyday, and some even every night, that there is not the slightest reason for concerning oneself with at all. In a simple homely way John Vance Cheney put a great truth along this line when he said:

"The happiest heart that ever beat

Was in some quiet breast,

That found the common daylight sweet,

And left to Heaven the rest."

July Twenty-first

If you would find the highest, the fullest, and the richest life that not only this world but that any world can know, then do away with the sense of separateness of your life from the life of God.

July Twenty-second

To follow the higher leadings of the soul, which is so constituted that it is the inlet, and as a consequence the outlet of Divine Spirit, Creative Energy, the real source of all wisdom and power; to project its leadings into every phase of material activity and endeavour, constitutes the ideal life. It was Emerson who said: "Every soul is not only the inlet, but may become the outlet of all there is in God." To keep this inlet open, so as not to shut out the Divine inflow, is the secret of all higher achievement, as well as attainment.

July Twenty-third

The hopeful, confident, successful type of thought not only attracts to us success, but it also attracts to us successful people, those whose lives are dominated by the same type or trend of thought.

July Twenty-fourth

Is there a great deal of work that each day brings? It is good if it is done rightly, and with the right mental attitude toward it. That we work is one of the laws of life. No one can be happy without it. There are thousands today who are unhappy and ill at ease, to whom life seems even a burden, who could change all these conditions if they had something definite and useful regularly to do. But here it is the middle ground, as is true in all phases of life. It is true of this the same as it is true of pleasure. It is always the middle ground that brings happiness and satisfaction — neither asceticism on the one hand, nor over-indulgence on the other.

For most of us there will always be work to do; but Ruskin lifts a curtain when he says: "Pleasure comes through toil and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work his life is a happy one."

July Twenty-fifth

The greatest thing ever known — indeed, the greatest thing that ever can be known — is that in our real essential nature we are one with the Infinite Life and Power, and that by coming into, and dwelling continually in, the conscious, living realization of this great fact, we enable to be manifested unto us and actualized within us the qualities and powers of the Divine Life, and this in the exact degree of the completeness of this realization on our part.

If we would win the best, we must early get rightly related to the Source of Life, and in the degree that we preserve our right relation to it, life flows on in a natural, orderly manner, and with a continually increasing unfoldment and growth.

July Twenty-sixth

We need more faith in everyday life — faith in the power that works for good, faith in the Infinite God, and hence faith in ourselves created in His image. And however things at times may seem to go, however dark at times appearances may be, the knowledge of the fact that "the Supreme Power has us in its charge as it has the suns and endless systems of worlds in space," will give us the supreme faith that all is well with us, the same as all is well with the world. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." There is nothing firmer, and safer, and surer than Deity. Then, as we recognize the fact that we have it in our own hands to open ourselves ever more fully to this Infinite Power, and call upon it to manifest itself in and through us, we will find in ourselves an ever increasing sense of power. For in this way we are working in conjunction with it, and it in turn is working in conjunction with us. We are then led into the full realization of the fact that all things work together for good to those that love the good.

July Twenty-seventh

It is better and more honest to believe that we determine our own fate, and then set about in a manly or a womanly fashion to carry this belief into practice, than to rail against an imaginary something we create and call Fate.

July Twenty-eighth

Thought is at the bottom of all progress or retrogression, of all success or failure, of all that is desirable or undesirable in human life. The type of thought we entertain both creates and draws conditions that crystallize about it, conditions exactly the same in nature as is the thought that gives them form.

For one to take time to see clearly the things one would attain to, and then to hold that ideal steadily and continually before his mind, never allowing faith — his positive thought-forces — to give way to or to be neutralized by doubts and fears, and then to set about doing each day what his hands find to do, never complaining, but spending the time that he would otherwise spend in complaint in focusing his thought-forces upon the ideal that his mind has built, will sooner or later bring about the full materialization of that for which he sets out.

July Twenty-ninth

Is there a great deal of work that each day brings? It is good if it is done rightly, and with the right mental attitude toward it. That we work is one of the laws of life. No one can be happy without it.

July Thirtieth

Would you remain young, and would you carry all the joyousness and buoyancy of youth into your maturer years? Then have care concerning but one thing, — how you live in your thought world. It was the inspired one, Gautama, the Buddha, who said, — "The mind is everything; what you think you become." And the same thing had Ruskin in mind when he said, — "Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us as yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought — proof against all adversity."

And would you have in your body the strength and the beauty of your younger years? Then live these in your mind, making no room for unclean thought, and you will externalize them in your body. In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body. And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind the same as mind helps body.

July Thirty-first

True enjoyment lies always along that royal middle ground — the use of all functions and powers, but with the imperial hand of mastery upon all. Otherwise there are always heavy penalties to pay.

August

August First

"The poem hangs on the berry-bush

When comes the poet's eye,

And the whole street is a masquerade

When Shakespeare passes by."

This same Shakespeare, whose mere passing causes all this commotion, is the one who put into the mouth of one of his creations the words: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." And again he gave us a great truth when he said:

"Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt."

There is probably no agent that brings us more undesirable conditions than fear. We should live in fear of nothing, nor will we when we come fully to know ourselves.

August Second

As a nation we do not share in the belief that the state is above morality, but rather that identically the same moral ideals, precepts and obligations that bind individuals must be held sacred by the state, otherwise it becomes a pirate among nations, and it will inevitably in time be hunted down and destroyed as such, however great its apparent power.

Nor do we as a nation share in the belief that war is necessary and indeed good for a nation, to inspire and to preserve its manly qualities, its virility, and therefore its power. Were this the only way that this could be brought about, it might be well and good; but the price to be paid is a price that is too enormous and too frightful, and the results are too uncertain. We believe that these same ideals can be inculcated, that these same energies can be used along useful, conserving, constructive lines, rather than along lines of destruction.

August Third

A nation may have the most colossal and perfect military system in the world, and still may suffer defeat in any given while, because of those unseen things that pertain to the soul of another people, whereby powers and forces are engendered and materialized that make defeat for them impossible; and in the matter of big guns, it is well always to remember that no nation can build them so great that another nation may not build them still greater. National safety does not necessarily lie in that direction. Nor, on the other hand, along the lines of extreme pacificism — surely not as long as things are as they are. The argument of the lamb has small deterrent effect upon the wolf — as long as the wolf is a wolf. And sometimes wolves hunt in packs.

The most pre-eminent lesson of the great war for us as a nation should be this — there should be constantly a degree of preparedness sufficient to hold until all the others, the various portions of the nation, thoroughly coordinated and ready, can be summoned into action. Thus are we prepared, thus are we safe, and there is no danger or fear of militarism.

August Fourth

Our period of isolation is over. We have become a world-nation. Equality of rights presupposes equality of duty. In our very souls we loathe militarism. Conquest and aggression are foreign to our spirit, and foreign to our thoughts and ambitions. But weakness will by no means assure us immunity from aggression from without.

Universal military training up to a reasonable point, and the joint sense of responsibility of every man and every woman in the nation, and the right of the national government to expect and to demand that every man and woman stand ready to respond to the call to service, whatever form it may take — this is our armour.

August Fifth

We need not fear militarism arising in America as long as the fundamental principles of democracy are preserved and continually extended, which can be done only through the feeling of the individual responsibility of every man and every woman to take a keen and constant interest in the matters of their own government — community, state, national, and now international. We must realize and ever more fully realize that in a government such as ours, the people are the government, and that when in it anything goes wrong, or wrongs and injustices are allowed to grow and hold sway, we are to blame.

But the mind, the temper, the traditions of our people are all a guarantee against militarism. The gospel, the hallucination of the shining armour, the will to power, has no attraction for us. We loathe it; nor do we fear its undermining and crushing our own liberties internally. Nevertheless, it is true that vigilance is always and always will be the price of liberty. There must be a constant education towards citizenship. There must be an alert democracy, so that any land and sea force is always the servant of the spirit; for only otherwise it can become its master - but otherwise it will become its master.

August Sixth

If one would have friends, he or she must be a friend, must radiate habitually friendly, helpful thoughts. The one who doesn't cultivate the hopeful, cheerful, good-will attitude toward life and toward others becomes a drag, making life harder for others as well as for oneself.

August Seventh

The divine right of kings has gone. It holds no more. We hear now and then, it is true, some silly statement in regard to it, but little attention is paid to it. The divine right of priests has gone except in the minds of the few remaining ignorant and herdable ones. The divine right of dynasties — or rather of dynasties to persist — seems to die a little harder, but it is well on the way. We are now realizing that the only divine right is the right of the people — and all the people.

Never again should it be possible for one man, or for one little group of men so to lead, or so to mislead a nation as to plunge it into war. The growth of democracy compelling the greater participation of all the people in government must prohibit this. So likewise the close relationship of the entire world now must make it for ever impossible for a single nation or a group of nations for any cause to plunge a whole world or any part of it into war.

August Eighth

Humanity and civilization is not headed towards Ab the caveman, whatever appearances, in the minds of many, may indicate at the present time. Humanity will arise and will reconstruct itself. Great lessons will be learned. Good will result. But what a terrific price to pay! What a terrific price to pay to learn the lesson that "moral forces are the only invincible forces in the universe"!

It has been slow, but steadily the world is advancing to that stage when the individual or the nation that does not know that the law of mutuality, of cooperation, and still more the law of sympathy and goodwill, is the supreme law in real civilization, real advancement, and real gain — that does not know that its own welfare is always bound up with the welfare of the greater whole — is still in the brute stage of life and the bestial propensities are still its guiding forces.

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred, national big-headedness, must give way to respect, sympathy, the desire for mutual understanding and cooperation. The higher attributes must and will assert themselves. The former are the ways of periodic if not continuous destruction — the latter are the ways of the higher spiritual forces that must prevail.

August Ninth

It took men of great insight as well as vision to formulate our own Constitution which made thirteen distinct and sovereign states the United States of America. The formulation of the Constitution of the World League has required such men. As a nation we may be proud that two representative Americans have had so large a share in its accomplishment — President Wilson, good Democrat, and Ex-President Taft, good Republican.

The greatest international and therefore world document ever produced has been forged — it awaits the coming days, years, and even generations for its completion. And we accord great honour also to those statesmen of other nations who have combined keen insight born of experience, with a lofty idealism; for out of these in any realm of human activities and relations, whatever eventually becomes the practical, is born.

August Tenth

Faith is an invisible and invincible magnet, and attracts to itself whatever it fervently desires and calmly and persistently expects.

August Eleventh

The Golden Rule is a wonderful developer in human life, a wonderful harmonizer in community life — with great profit it could be extended as the law of conduct in international relations. It must be so extended. Its very foundation is sympathy, goodwill, mutuality, love.

The very essence of Jesus' entire revelation and teaching was love. It was not the teaching of weakness or supineness in the face of wrong, however. There was no failure on his part to smite wrong when he saw it — wrong taking the form of injustice or oppression. He had, as we have seen, infinite sympathy for and forbearance with the weak, the sinful; but he had always a righteous indignation and a scathing denunciation for oppression — for that spirit of hell that prompts men or organizations to seek, to study, to dominate the minds and thereby the lives of others.

It was, moreover, that he would not keep silent regarding the deadly ecclesiasticism that bore so heavily upon his people and that had well-nigh crushed all their religious life whence are the very springs of life, that he aroused the deadly antagonism of the ruling hierarchy. And as he, witnessing for truth and freedom, steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression, so those who catch his spirit today will do as he did and will realize as duty — "While wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace!"

August Twelfth

Jesus gave the great principles, the animating spirit of life, not minute details of conduct. The real Church of Christ is not a hierarchy, an institution, it is a brotherhood — the actual establishing of the Kingdom of God in moral, ethical and social terms in the world.

August Thirteenth

It was Lincoln who gave us a wonderful summary when he said: "After all the one meaning of life is to be kind."

Love, sympathy, fellowship is the very foundation of all civilized, happy, ideal life. It is the very balance-wheel of life itself. It gives that genuineness and simplicity in voice, in look, in spirit that is so instinctively felt by all, and to which all so universally respond. It is like the fragrance of the flower — the emanation of its soul.

Interesting and containing a most vital truth is this little memoir by Christine Rossetti: "One whom I knew intimately, and whose memory I revere, once in my hearing remarked that, 'unless we love people, we cannot understand them.' This was a new light to me." It contains indeed a profound truth.

August Fourteenth

Love, sympathy, fellowship, is what makes human life truly human. Cooperation, mutual service, is its fruitage. A clear-cut realization of this and a resolute acting upon it would remove much of the cloudiness and the barrenness from many a life; and its mutual recognition — and action based upon it — would bring order and sweetness and mutual gain in vast numbers of instances in family, in business, in community life.

It would solve many of the knotty problems in all lines of human relations and human endeavour, whose solution heretofore has seemed well-nigh impossible. It is the telling oil that will start to run smoothly and effectively many an otherwise clogged and grating system of human machinery.

When men on both sides are long-headed enough, are sensible enough to see its practical element and make it the fundamental basis of all relationships, of all negotiations, and all following activities in the relations between capital and labour, employer and employee, literally a new era in the industrial world will spring into being. Both sides will be the gainer — the dividends flowing to each will be even surprising.

August Fifteenth

There is really no labour problem outside of sympathy, mutuality, good-will, cooperation, brotherhood.

Injustice always has been and always will be the cause of all labour troubles. But we must not forget that it is sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. Misunderstanding is not infrequently its accompaniment. Imagination, sympathy, mutuality, cooperation, brotherhood are the hand-maidens of justice.

No man is intelligent enough, is big enough to be the representative or the manager of capital, who is not intelligent enough to realize this. No man is fit to be the representative of, or fit to have anything to do with the councils of labour who has not brains, intelligence enough to realize this. These qualities are not synonyms of or in any way related to sentimentality or any weak-kneed ethics. They underlie the soundest business sense. In this day and age they are synonyms of the word practical.

August Sixteenth

Within the nation during this great reconstruction period, these are times that call for heroic men and women. In a Democracy or in any representative form of government an alert citizenship is its only safety.

With a vastly increased voting population, in that many millions of women citizens are now admitted to full citizenship, the needs for intelligent action and attention to matters of government was never so great. Great numbers will be herded and voted by organizations as well as by machines. As these will comprise the most ignorant and therefore the herdable ones, it is especially incumbent upon the great rank and file of intelligent women to see that they take and maintain an active interest in public affairs.

August Seventeenth

Our chief problem is to see that Democracy is made safe for and made of real service to the world. Our American education must be made continually more keenly alive to the great moral, ethical and social needs of the time. Thereby it will be made religious without having any sectarian slant or bias; it will be made safe for and the hand-maid of Democracy and not a menace to it.

Vast multitudes today are seeing as never before that the moral and ethical foundations of the nation's and the world's life is a matter of primal concern to all.

We are finding more and more that the simple fundamentals of life and conduct as portrayed by the Christ of Nazareth not only constitutes a great idealism, but the only practical way of life. Compared to this and to the need that it come more speedily and more universally into operation in the life of the world today, truly "sectarian peculiarities are obsolete impertinences."

August Eighteenth

We will do well as children of the same Father to sit down and talk matters over; and arise with the conclusion that the advice of Jesus, our elder brother, is sound: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

He gave it no label, but it has subsequently become known as the Golden Rule. There is no higher rule and no greater developer of the highest there is in the individual human life, and no greater adjuster and beautifier of the problems of our common human life. And when it becomes sufficiently strong in its action in this, the world awaits its projection into its international life.

This is the truth that he revealed — the two-fold truth of love to God and love for the neighbour, that shall make men free. The truth of the Man of Nazareth still holds and shall hold, and we must realize this adequately before we ask or can expect any other revelation.

August Nineteenth

If God intended anything, he intended that we live simply and naturally, that we grow — sometimes through knocks — and, growing, that we contribute our share to the neighbours' and the world's life and work, but that we be happy while we do it.

August Twentieth

The value of prayer is not that God will change or order any laws or forces to suit the numerous and necessarily the diverse petitions of many. All things are through law, and law is fixed and inexorable. The value of prayer, of true prayer, is that through it one can so harmonize his life with the Divine order that intuitive perceptions of truth and a greater perception and knowledge of law becomes his possession. As has been said by an able contemporary thinker and writer: "We cannot form a passably thorough notion of man without saturating it through and through with the idea of a cosmic inflow from outside his world life — the inflow of God. Without a large consciousness of the universe beyond our knowledge, few men, if any, have done great things.[1]

August Twenty-first

It was more than a mere poetic idea that Lowell gave utterance to when he said:

The thing we long for, that we are

For one transcendent moment.

To establish this connection, to actualize this God-consciousness, that it may not be for one transcendent moment, but that it may become constant and habitual, so that every thought arises, and so that every act goes forth from this centre, is the greatest good that can come into the possession of man. There is nothing greater. It is none other than the realization of Jesus' injunction — "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." It is then that he said — Do not worry about your life. Your mind and your will are under the guidance of the Divine mind; your every act goes out under this direction and all things pertaining to your life will fall into their proper places. Therefore do not worry about your life.

August Twenty-second

I shall always remember with great pleasure and profit a call a few days ago from Dr. Edward Emerson of Concord, Emerson's eldest son. Happily I asked him in regard to his father's methods of work — if he had any regular methods. He replied in substance: It was my father's custom to go daily to the woods — to listen. He would remain there an hour or more in order to get whatever there might be for him that day. He would then come home and write into a little book — his "day-book" — what he had gotten. Later on when it came time to write a book, he would transcribe from this, in their proper sequence and with their proper connections, these entrances of the preceding weeks or months. The completed book became virtually a ledger formed or posted from his day-books.

The prophet is he who so orders his life that he can adequately listen to the voice, the revelations of the over soul, and who truthfully transcribes what he hears or senses. He is not a follower of custom or of tradition. He can never become and can never be made the subservient tool of an organization. His aim and his mission is rather to free men from ignorance, superstition, credulity, from half-truths, by leading them into a continually larger understanding of truth, of law — and therefore of righteousness.

August Twenty-third

The larger natures see the good in and sympathize with the weaknesses and the frailties of others. They realize also that it is so consummately inconsistent for one also with weaknesses, frailties, and faults, though perhaps of a little different character, to sit in judgment of another.

August Twenty-fourth

Not only is constant vigilance incumbent upon us, but realizing the fact that the boys and the girls of today are the citizens of tomorrow — the nation's voters and law-makers — it is incumbent upon us to see that American free education through American free public schools, is advanced to and maintained at its highest possibilities, and kept free from any agencies that will make for a divided or anything less than a whole-hearted and intelligent citizenship.

The motto on the Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square in London: "There is no darkness but ignorance," might well be reproduced in every city and every hamlet in the nation.

August Twenty-fifth

Late revelations have shown how even education can be manipulated and prostituted for ulterior purposes. Parochial schools whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Oriental, have no place in American institutions — and whether their work is carried on in English or in a foreign language. They are absolutely foreign to the spirit of our institutions. They are purely for the sake of something less than the nation itself. Blind indeed are we if we are not history-wise. Criminal indeed are we to allow any boys or girls to be diverted to them and to be deprived of the advantages of a better schooling, and being brought under the influences of agencies that are thoroughly and wholly American.

August Twenty-sixth

American education must be made for American institutions and for nothing less than this. The nation's children should be shielded from any power that seeks to get possession of them in order at an early and unaccountable age to fasten authority upon them, and to drive a wedge between them and all others of the nation.

The nation has a duty to every child within its borders. To fail to recognize or to shirk that duty, will call for a price to be paid sometime as great as that that has been paid by every other nation that did not see until too late. Sectarianism in education stultifies and robs the child and nullifies the finest national instincts in education. It is for but one purpose — the use and the power of the organization that plans and that fosters it.

August Twenty-seventh

Our government profiting by the long weary struggles of other countries, is founded upon the absolute separation of church and state. This does not mean the separation of religion in its true sense from the state; but keeping it free from every type of sectarian influence and domination. It is ours to see that no silent subtle influences are at work, that will eventually make the same trouble here as in other countries, or that will thrust out the same stifling hand to undermine and to throttle universal free public education, and the inalienable right that every child has to it. Our children are the wards of and accountable to the nation — they are not the property of any organization, group or groups, less than the state.

We need the creation of a strong Federal Department of Education of cabinet rank, with ample means and strong powers to be the guiding genius of all our state and local departments of education, with greater attention paid to a more thorough and concrete training in civics, in moral and ethical education, in addition to the other well recognized branches in public school education. It should have such powers also as will enable it to see that every child is in school up to a certain age, or until all the fundamentals of a prescribed standard of American education are acquired.

August Twenty-eighth

Our love, our service, our helpfulness to others, invariably comes back to us, intensified sometimes a hundred or a thousand or a thousand, thousand-fold, and this by a great immutable law.

August Twenty-ninth

The greatest gains in the relations between capital and labour during the coming few years will undoubtedly be along the lines of profit-sharing. Some splendid beginnings are already in successful operation. There is the recognition that capital is entitled initially to a fair return; again that labour is entitled to a good and full living wage — when both these conditions are met then that there be an equal division of the profits that remain, between the capital and the skill and management back of the capital invested on the one hand, and labour on the other. Without the former labour would have no employment in the particular enterprise; without the workers the former could not carry on. Each is essential to the other.

August Thirtieth

Labour being not a commodity, as some material thing merely to be bought and sold, but the human element, is entitled to more than a living wage. It has human aspirations, and desires and needs. It has not only its present but its own and its children's future to safeguard. When it is thus made a partner in the business it becomes more earnest and reliable and effective in its work, less inclined to condone the shiftless, the incompetent, the slacker; more eager and resolute in withstanding the ill-founded, reckless or sinister suggestions or efforts of an ill-advised leadership.

Capital or employer is the gainer also, because it is insured that loyal and more intelligent cooperation in its enterprise that is as essential to its success as is the genius and skill of management.

August Thirty-first

The world," said Emerson, "belongs to the energetic and the wise." The universe, indeed, seems to be so constructed that it responds to earnest desire, energetic action, and determined purpose.

September

September First

Differences that have sometimes separated our various religious bodies on account of differences of opinion, whether in thought or interpretation,[2] are now found to be so insignificant when compared to the actual simple fundamentals that the Master taught, and when compared to the work to be done, that a great Interallied Church Movement is now taking concrete and strong working form, that is equipping the church for a mighty and far-reaching Christian work. A new and great future lies immediately ahead. The good it is equipping itself to accomplish is beyond calculation — a work in which minister and layman will have equal voice and equal share. It will receive also great inspiration and it will eagerly strike hands with all allied

movements that are following the same leader, but along different roads.

September Second

In our mental lives we can either keep hold of the rudder and so determine exactly what course we take, what points we touch, or we can fail to do this, and failing, we drift, and are blown hither and thither by every passing breeze.

September Third

For the all-round life there must be the balance also as to the kinds of work. The hand, manual, ground worker, to insure the most happy and satisfying life for himself, to say nothing of his greater value to his community, to the state, must turn periodically into the intellectual bye-ways, through investigation, study, reading, a greater intelligence of the best and latest developments and findings in his own work, as well as keeping in touch with general progress. This will determine whether he remain or become a mere machine or an intelligent, commanding worker, as also a valuable citizen.

The brain worker, the businessman, and especially the one doing creative mental work, if he would know the all-round joy of living, must have that to turn to whereby his hands, his body, get their normal, healthy activity, and if it be useful, constructive work, or work in or of the soil, the greater the interest and value.

This would save almost countless thousands of good men and good women that over-wrought, nervous, brain and nerve fagged condition that renders full enjoyment of anything impossible, that causes a craving for and a turning to stimulants, excitement, extravagances that only increase their difficulties. It would save them to the simple, healthy, homely, and lasting joys that nature rewards never with satiety, but with good sleep, good appetite, good digestion, in brief, that greatest of all earthly blessings — good health.

September Fourth

Whatever channel the mind sets itself in the life will follow; for it is invariably true that the life always follows the thought.

September Fifth

When we turn to Jesus' own teachings, we find that his insistence was not primarily upon the saving of the soul, but upon the saving of the life for usefulness, for service, here and now, for still higher growth and unfoldment, whereby the soul might be grown to a sufficient degree that it would be worth the saving. And this is one of the great facts that is now being recognized and preached by the forward-looking men and women in our churches, and by many equally religious outside of our churches.

September Sixth

All things are for a purpose, all should be used and enjoyed; but all should be rightly used that they may be fully enjoyed.

September Seventh

Travel is of great value as well as of great interest, not only during its progress. It is a wonderful asset to have in one's life by way of the memories that it gives and enables the mind to live through many times, through all the years that follow. It makes one indeed a citizen of the world, instead of a provincial.

It widens one's horizon and gives him a truer perspective for all things in life, as well as a more intelligent interest and contact with all the world. The diversified human touch and the contact that it gives, leads up to the heights where we have continually the wider horizon.

September Eighth

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee," has been and perhaps will be for ages to come, the sustaining force of thousands of lives. Perhaps no greater truth in a single sentence has ever been uttered in the world's history than this.

September Ninth

When any theory or system becomes institutionalized, then, there is always a very great tendency in human nature to bring in additional things, to invent, to romance, to make more complex, and to mystify, in order that there seem to be enough to hold the people, in order, in turn, that the institution may grow or even hold its own.

This has occurred time and again in the world's history. It is the great danger of institutions and organizations. Invariably the time comes when the spirit departs from them and the empty shell remains. Then people begin to feed on husks, missing thereby the life-giving grain. They think the vehicle is the thing — the end — when it is simply a means to an end. It is this condition that Jesus spoke so profoundly against. He would unquestionably speak as profoundly against the same condition were he among us today.

September Tenth

The other day a couple of little girls came to a physician's office to be vaccinated. One of them undertook to speak for the other, and explained: "Doctor, this is my sister. She is too young to know her left arm from her right, so mamma washed them both."

There was an element of the haphazard in at least one department of the life of this family. There is an element of the haphazard, I fear, in those of most of us.

There are some lives that seem so even, so definite, so straight-to-the-mark like, while there are others — so many others — that seem so haphazard, so unsystematized, so get-nowhere like. Is it all merely a matter of chance?

If we look deeply enough, we will find that in connection with human life, as well as in connection with the universe about us, there is no such thing as chance. There is only law, and the great elemental law of cause and effect is in operation, and with absolute precision, in the universe about us and in each individual life. An able writer has said: "God, the maker of all things, does not change His laws. 'As you sow you reap.' He simply makes His laws, and we work our destinies for good or ill according to our adherence to them or violation of them,"

In connection with human life the general law is — As is the inner so always and necessarily is the outer.

September Eleventh

There are certain faculties that we have that are not a part of the active thinking mind; they seem to be no part of what we might term our conscious intelligence. They transcend any possible activities of our regular mental processes, and they are in some ways independent of them. Through some avenue, suggestions, intuitions of truth, intuitions of occurrences of which through the thinking mind we could know nothing, are at times borne in upon us; they flash into our consciousness, as we say, quite independent of any mental action on our part, and sometimes when we are thinking of something quite foreign to that which comes to, that which "impresses," us.

This seems to indicate a source of knowledge, a faculty that is distinct from, but that acts in various ways in conjunction with, the active thinking mind. It performs likewise certain very definite and distinct functions in connection with the body. It is this that is called the subconscious mind — by some the superconscious or the supernormal mind, by others the subliminal self.

September Twelfth

Every moment of our lives, at least during our waking hours, we are unconsciously forming habits. Is it well unconsciously to form them and thereby drift, or run the risk of drifting, or consciously to form them, and get thereby definite, orderly, and desirable results?

The habit will follow the thought. No habit — good or bad — ever has or ever can be established in any other way. If then an undesirable habit has been formed through a certain type or course of thinking, it can be pushed out of the life and its opposite be made to take its place, by entertaining and holding to a different type and course of thought. Whatever types of thoughts therefore one chooses, his or her life will inevitably follow.

September Thirteenth

Courage and faith beget energy and power; energy and power rightly directed bring success. Such, as a rule, are the successful people — successful simply by way of natural law.

September Fourteenth

No man can live to himself alone. The Order of the Universe has been written from time immemorial against it. There is no man who has ever found happiness by striving for it directly. It never has and it never can come that way. Why? Simply because the very laws of the universe are against it.

It was Charles Kingsley who sang so truly:

"Friends, in this world of hurry

And work and sudden end,

If a thought comes quick of doing

A kindness to a friend,

Do it that very instant!

Don't put it off — don't wait!

What's the use of doing a kindness

If you do it a day too late!"

September Fifteenth

The mind carries with it the power that perpetuates its own type of thought, the same as the body carries with it through the reflex nerve system the power which perpetuates and makes continually easier its own particular acts. Thus a simple effort to control one's thoughts, a simple setting about it, even if at first failure is the result, and even if for a time failure seems to be about the only result, will in time, sooner or later, bring him to the point of easy, full, and complete control.

Each one, then, can grow the power of determining, controlling his thought, the power of determining what types of thought he shall and what types he shall not entertain. For let us never part in mind with this fact, that every earnest effort along any line makes the end aimed at just a little easier for each succeeding effort, even if, as has been said, apparent failure is the result of the earlier efforts. This is a case where even failure is success, for the failure is not in the effort, and every earnest effort adds an increment of power that will eventually accomplish the end aimed at.

September Sixteenth

We speak of a man's failing in business, little thinking that the real failure came long before, and that the final crash is but the culmination, the outward visible manifestation, of the real failure that occurred within possibly long ago. A man carries his success or his failure with him: it is not dependent upon outside conditions.

September Seventeenth

The mental attitude we take toward anything determines to a greater or less extent its effects upon us. If we fear it, or if we antagonize it, the chances are that it will have detrimental or even disastrous effects upon us. If we come into harmony with it by quietly recognizing and inwardly asserting our superiority over it, in the degree that we are able successfully to do this, in that degree will it carry with it no injury for us.

September Eighteenth

If we would seek the essence of Jesus' revelation, attested both by his words and his life, it was to bring a knowledge of the ineffable love of God to man, and by revealing this, to instil in the minds and hearts of men love for God, and a knowledge of and following of the ways of God. It was also then to bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of love — the love of man for man. Combined, it results, so to speak, in raising men to a higher power, to a higher life, — as individuals, as groups, as one great world group.

It is a newly sensitized attitude of mind and heart that he brought and that he endeavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty — a following not of the traditions of men, but fidelity to one's God, whereby the Divine rule in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and, as must inevitably follow, fidelity on one's fellowmen. These are the essentials of Jesus' revelation — the fundamental forces in his own life.

September Nineteenth

And so we have this young Galilean prophet, coming from a hitherto unknown Jewish family in the obscure little village of Nazareth, giving obedience in common with his four brothers and sisters to his father and his mother; but by virtue of a supreme aptitude for and an irresistible call to the things of the spirit — made irresistible through his overwhelming love for the things of the spirit — that he is early absorbed by the realization of the truth that God is his father and that all men are brothers.

The thought that God is his father and that he bears a unique and filial relationship to God so possesses him that he is filled, permeated with the burning desire to make this newborn message of truth and thereby of righteousness known to the world.

His own native religion, once vibrating through the souls of the prophets as the voice of God, has become so obscured, so hedged about, so killed by dogma, by ceremony, by outward observances, that it has become a mean and pitiable thing, and produces mean and pitiable conditions in the lives of his people. The institution has become so overgrown that the spirit has gone. But God finds another prophet, clearly and supremely open to His spirit, and Jesus comes as the Messiah, the Divine Son of God, the Divine Son of Man, bringing to the earth a new Dispensation. It is the message of the Divine Fatherhood of God, God whose controlling character is love, and with it the Divine sonship of man. An integral part of it is — all men are brothers.

September Twentieth

He comes as the teacher of a new, a higher righteousness. He brings the message and he expounds the message of the Kingdom of God. All men he teaches must repent and turn from their sins, and must henceforth live in this Kingdom. It is an inner kingdom. Men shall not say: Behold, it is here or it is there; for, behold, it is within you. God is your father and God longs for your acknowledgment of Him as your father; He longs for your love even as He loves you.

You are children of God, but you are not true Sons of God until through desire the Divine rule and life becomes supreme in your minds and hearts. It is thus that you will find the Kingdom of God. When you do, then your every act will show forth in accordance with this Divine ideal and guide, and the supreme law of conduct in your lives will be love for your neighbour, for all mankind. Through this there will then in time become actualized the Kingdom of Heaven on the earth.

September Twenty-first

In this majestic life divinity and humanity meet. Here is the incarnation. The first of the race consciously, vividly, and fully to realize that God incarnates Himself and has His abode in the hearts and the lives of men, the first therefore to realize his Divine Sonship and become able thereby to reveal and to teach the Divine Fatherhood of God and the Divine Sonship of Man.

In this majestic life is the atonement, the realization of the at-one-ment of the Divine in the human, made manifest in his own life and by the way that he taught, sealed then by his own blood.

In this majestic life we have the mediator, the medium or connector of the Divine and the human. In it we have the Saviour, the very incarnation of the truth that he taught and that lifts the minds and thereby the lives of men up to their Divine ideal and pattern, that redeems their lives from the sordidness and selfishness and sin of the hitherto purely material self, and that being thereby saved, makes them fit subjects for the Father's Kingdom.

In this majestic life is the full embodiment of the beauty of holiness — whose words have gone forth and whose spirit is ceaselessly at work in the world, drawing men and women up to their divine ideal and that will continue so to draw all in proportion as his words of truth and his life are lifted up throughout the world.

September Twenty-second

And whatever changes the years may bring, there should be gains, in experience, in knowledge, in wisdom, and in powers, that will far more than compensate for whatever losses or apparent losses the passing years have brought.

September Twenty-third

It is not with observation, said Jesus, that the supreme thing he taught — the seeking and finding of the Kingdom of God — will come. Do not seek it at some other place, some other time. It is within, and if within it will show forth. It touches and it sensitizes the inner springs of action in a man's or a woman's life.

When a man realizes his Divine sonship that Jesus taught, he will act as a son of God. Out of the heart spring either good or evil actions. Self-love, me, mine; let me get all I can for myself, or, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself — the Divine law of service, of mutuality — the highest source of ethics.

You can trust any man whose heart is right. He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word will be as good as his bond. Personally you can't trust a man who is brought into any line of action, or into any institution through fear. The sore is there, liable to break out in corruption at any time. This opening up of the springs of the inner life frees him also from the letter of the law, which after all consists of the traditions of men, and makes him subject to that higher moral guide within.

September Twenty-fourth

In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body. And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind the same as mind builds body.

September Twenty-fifth

A man may be a believer in Jesus for a full life-time and still be an outcast from the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. But a man can't believe Jesus, which means following his teachings, without coming at once into the Kingdom and enjoying its matchless blessings both here and hereafter. And if there is one clear-cut teaching of the Master, it is that the life here determines and with absolute precision the life to come.

One need not then concern himself with this or that doctrine, whether it be true or false. Later speculations and theories are not for him. Jesus' own saying replies here: "If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." He enters into the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven here and now; and when the time comes for him to pass out of this life, he goes as a joyous pilgrim, full of anticipation for the Kingdom that awaits him, and the Master's words go with him: "In my Father's house are many mansions."

September Twenty-sixth

The old dispensation, with its legal formalism, was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The new dispensation was — "But I say unto you, Love your enemies." Enmity begets enmity. It is as senseless as it is godless. It runs through all his teachings and through every act of his life. If fundamentally you do not have the love of your fellowman in your hearts, you do not have the love of God in your hearts and you cannot have.

And that this fundamental revelation be not misunderstood, near the close of his life he said: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." No man could be, can be his disciple, his follower, and fail in the realization of this fundamental teaching. "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another." And going back again to his ministry we find that it breathes through every teaching that he gave. It breathes through that short memorable prayer which we call the Lord's Prayer. It permeates the Sermon on the Mount. It is the very essence of his summing up of this discourse.

We call it the Golden Rule. "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Not that it was original with Jesus; other teachers sent of God had given it before to other peoples — God's other children; but he gave it a new emphasis, a new setting. He made it fundamental.

September Twenty-seventh

So a man who is gripped at all vitally by Jesus' teaching of the personal fatherhood of God, and the personal brotherhood of man, simply can't help but make this the basic rule of his life — and moreover find joy in so making it.

A man who really comprehends this fundamental teaching can't be crafty, sneaking, dishonest, or dishonourable, in his business, or in any phase of his personal life. He never hogs the penny — in other words, he never seeks to gain his own advantage to the disadvantage of another. He may be long-headed; he may be able to size up and seize conditions; but he seeks no advantage for himself to the detriment of his fellow, to the detriment of his community, or to the detriment of his extended community, the nation or the world. He is thoughtful, considerate, open, frank; and, moreover, he finds great joy in being so.

September Twenty-eighth

It is our eternal refusal to follow Jesus by listening to the words of life that he brought, and our proneness to substitute something else in their place, that brings the barrenness that is so often evident in the everyday life of the Christian. We have been taught to believe in Jesus; we have not been taught to believe Jesus. This has resulted in a separation of Christianity from life. The predominating motive has been the saving of the soul. It has resulted too often in a selfish, negative, repressive, ineffective religion. As Jesus said: "And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?"

We are just beginning to realize at all adequately that it was the salvation of the life that he taught. When the life is redeemed to righteousness through the power of the indwelling God and moves out in love and in service for one's fellowmen, the soul is then saved.

September Twenty-ninth

The present state and condition of the body have been produced primarily by the thoughts that have been taken by the conscious mind into the subconscious, that is so intimately related to and that directs all the subconscious and involuntary functions of the body.

September Thirtieth

We can't have an expansive stretch of healthy life without an expansive sweep of the mind. Littleness of mind, jealousy, envy, the tendency to gossip, looking for the faults rather than the good traits in others, all have their adverse, stultifying, dwarfing influences.

October

October First

So supremely had this young Jewish prophet, the son of a carpenter, made God's business his business, that he had come into the full realization of the oneness of his life with the Father's life. He was able to realize and to say, "I and my Father are one." He was able to bring to the world a knowledge of the great fact of facts — the essential oneness of the human with the Divine — that God tabernacles with men, that He makes His abode in the minds and the hearts of those who through desire and through will open their hearts to His indwelling presence.

The first of the race, he becomes the revealer of this great eternal truth — the mediator, therefore, between God and man — in very truth the Saviour of men.

October Second

We need more faith in everyday life, — faith in the power that works for good, faith in the Infinite God, and hence faith in ourselves created image.

October Third

We are all influenced, and whether conscious of it or not, by the prevailing mental and emotional states and conditions of those with whom we come in contact.

It was Beecher who said: "There are persons so radiant, so genial, so kind, so pleasure-bearing, that you instinctively feel in their presence that they do you good; whose coming into a room is like the bringing of a lamp there."

October Fourth

Not only are our accomplishments determined by our prevailing types of thought, but our influence upon others is determined in this same way. Those who come in personal contact with us are influenced invariably, though many times unconsciously, by our prevailing types of thought.

If we are hopeful, we inspire hope — we radiate hope and encouragement and strength, so to speak. If we have a feeling of friendship and good-will and helpfulness — love — we inspire these same qualities in others, and the same types of warming and life-giving thought-forces come back in turn to us from them. It is, therefore, scientifically true that as a man gives, he gets.

October Fifth

The great and strong character is the one who is ever ready to sacrifice the present pleasure for the future good.

October Sixth

If we are small and critical, we inspire and call from others the small and critical type of thought and act. If we hate we inspire hatred, and, with its chilling, killing qualities, it will turn back to us again.

If we live in envy of those who are doing things, we are dwarfing powers within us that, if rightly cultivated and grown, would enable us likewise to do things, and thus remove any cause for envy. If we love we inspire love, and the warming, ennobling, uplifting influences of love will come back to us.

We can hinder and retard another by holding him or her in the thought of weakness or failure, the same as we can hinder or retard our own efforts.

October Seventh

To keep calm and quiet within — and the mouth closed — and to look forward with hope and faith and courage, and with the dogged determination of still finding the best when the illusions break or show cracks, is the mark of the man or the woman who will finally win out.

It's the man or the woman who does not allow himself or herself to get, as the expression is, "all balled up," who generally arrives, and who also wears. Those who do allow it are generally the greatest hindrances there are in the world to themselves, and they are likewise a hindrance to others. Certainly, others are influenced, and generally badly influenced, by the uncertain, excitable and non-productive type of thought that emanates as an atmosphere from us.

October Eighth

Humanity is brave, so brave we will find if we search carefully — and even at times perchance if we look within — as to fill us with admiration for this rather common and, at times, queer and questionable thing we call Human Nature.

Hope and courage and sympathy and trust are great producers, and they are great factors in a man's doing his duty, as well as his having the joy of achievement. "Never to tire," said Amiel, "never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always like God; to love always — this is Duty."

October Ninth

The life of everyone is in his own hands and he can make it in character, in attainment, in power, in divine self-realization, and hence in influence, exactly what he wills to make it.

October Tenth

No, an optimistic philosophy rightly understood, does not teach that life is merely a long, even holiday, that there are no minor strains in what might be termed its daily music, no problems to be solved, no bread to be earned, no tired bodies that welcome the rest of the night, no burdens to be shared with friend, neighbour, relative.

It does teach that we should always look for the best there is, and always expect to find it, and that we should never allow ourselves to indulge in fears and forebodings, and to stand trembling and helpless when the problem arises, when the distressing circumstance presents itself, when the work is to be done, and perchance the sorrow or bereavement to be borne.

It teaches also to turn never a deaf, but always a ready ear to the friend's or neighbour's signal of distress. It equips us with the weapons to face such conditions when they arise, and to so direct them that they work for our advantage and our good, instead of against us.

October Eleventh

The greatest greatness and the only true greatness in the world is unselfish love and service and self-devotion to one's fellowmen.

October Twelfth

It is well that we work each for his own individual good. Anyone, however, who stops there will find that he can never reach his highest individual good unless he takes also an interest — and not merely a sentimental, but an active interest — in the lives and in the welfare of those about him. "Help thou thy brother's boat across, and, lo! thine own has reached the shore," says the Hindoo proverb.

There must be the general as well as the individual good, and only he who is aiding it is realizing the best for himself. "I have noticed," said Uncle Eben, "dat de man who gits so selfish dat he can't think o' nobody 'cept hisse'f, ginerally looks like he war thinkin' of sumpin' disagreeable."

October Thirteenth

If we adopt a philosophy that recognizes the working always of the law of cause and effect, instead of mere blind chance happening, then we believe that everything that comes into our lives has its part to play, and it is our portion to meet whatever comes in such a way that it will serve its highest purposes in our lives.

Personally, I believe that nothing ever comes by chance, that everything comes through the operation of law, although many times we are not able to see the cause that has produced or that is producing such results.

Moreover, I believe that whatever comes has its part to play, its mission to fulfil, and that if we cannot always see it, we may not do unwisely in having faith that the time will come when we will eventually rejoice that each thing came as it came.

If we can preserve this attitude, then when the difficult thing is before us, its sting will be drawn, and our faith, insight, and courage to meet it wisely, and to get the best there is from it, will be increased many times a hundredfold.

October Fourteenth

One of the great laws of life is giving — we term it service. Service for others is just as essential to our real happiness and to our highest welfare as is the fact that we work for our own individual welfare. No man lives to himself alone. No man can live to himself alone. The Order of the Universe has been written from time immemorial against it.

There is no man who has ever found happiness by striving for it directly. It never has and it never can come that way. Why? Simply because the very laws of the universe are against it.

October Fifteenth

And so pleasure comes not by seeking for it directly and regularly, but is the outcome, the natural outcome, of a well-regulated, an alert, progressive, unself-centred and useful life.

October Sixteenth

Joy in another's success not only indicates always the large type, but it indicates that they in turn are worthy of success themselves. And if they are not always what we term a success in some given field, or art, or in acquiring wealth, they are a success in the greatest of arts, the Art of Living. They are also a success in that the joy and happiness of others enters into and becomes a portion of their own lives. Half the heartaches of the world would be banished, and half its burdens would be lifted, if every life were habitually tuned to this deep but simply expressed sentiment by Emily Dickinson:

"They might not need me — yet they might,

I'll let my heart be just in sight.

A smile so small as mine might be

Precisely their necessity."

October Seventeenth

Hope and tranquillity open the channels of the body, so that the life forces go bounding through it in such a way that disease can rarely get a foothold.

October Eighteenth

We should be lenient in judging another, and we should be lenient in judging ourselves. From my own stumblings and errors and fallings I have come to the place where my only question in regard to another is, Which way is he looking? Not, how much has he groped and stumbled and fallen, the same as myself; but is his face now turned in the right direction, and is he genuinely endeavouring to keep it there?

If he is wise enough, when he falls, to linger there only long enough to get his lesson, and long-headed enough to learn it quickly and go on, even his stumbling becomes an asset, and it is a mere matter of time before he reaches a very certain destination.

The bright child doesn't have to be burned continually. The wise man or woman learns his or her lessons quickly and goes on. "Don't worry when you stumble — remember, a worm is about the only thing that can't fall down," someone has said most admirably.

October Nineteenth

Life is so much more interesting than boards and bricks, than lands and business blocks, and even bank accounts, and the men who are thoroughly interested in life are always of more account, and are always of greater value to the world, as well as to themselves, than the men who are interested only in these.

That is why a very eminent corporation lawyer, in a notable address some time ago, said: "It is because I believe so strongly in the saving power of the intellectual life upon the institutions of society, and upon the welfare, of individuals, that I plead so earnestly for it. The fortunes of science, art, literature, and government are indissolubly linked with it. The centres and shrines of the most potent influences are not the seats of commerce and capital. The village of Concord, where Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau lived, was, in their day, and will long continue to be, a greater force in this nation than New York and Chicago added to each other. We may rest in the assured faith that, whoever may seem to rule, the thinker is, and always will be, the master." We can readily see what he meant, and can we say that he was not right?

October Twentieth

It is true that the common man is the man who allows himself to be absorbed completely by the common, and by common, I mean the purely material, things of life — boards, bricks, crops, lands, markets, business, food, clothing. All of these we readily admit are important. But unless a man can rise above these in thought, in mind, in spirit, in appreciation and enjoyment, now and then, he is, and he is regarded by his neighbours, as a common man.

That is why a man who may be worth many millions, but who has neither appreciation nor ability for the enjoyment of things beyond his millions, is a very common man.

October Twenty-first

Mankind is advancing. It is attaining to an ever higher standing ground, and it is placing those who are incapable of the things of the mind and spirit, the imagination and the heart, on a very ordinary plane.

No, the best is the life — the things of the mind and spirit. They will buy out all the world at last. Why? Because they are the things that are real, the things that will last, the only things that eventually really count. It's the thinker and the man of broad unself-centred, sympathetic impulses that always will lead, and that always will be recognized as the leader.

October Twenty-second

I think a great reason why the quality of happiness and contentment is escaping so many lives is that we have lost, to a great extent, the sense of proportion. We are concerned and absorbed with so many things that are merely means to an end, instead of with the end itself. Not that these are not of importance; but they are, after all, merely means, and they can never have any importance other than merely relative. We are concerned more with the "fixings" of life, and the means of ever increasing them, than we are with the life itself. And, after all, we can never get away from the fact, except at the expense always of a great personal loss, and many times even at our peril, that the life is the thing.

October Twenty-third

The redemption of man takes place when the spirit of God takes possession of his mind and heart, and permeates his daily life to the minutest detail. "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the Sons of God." Such was the life and such was the teaching of Jesus.

October Twenty-fourth

A man may become wealthy, he may become very wealthy in the sense of acquiring money. He may become a millionaire, and even many times over, by working for it directly. But very common men have done that. Indeed, many of a low type have done it. We now have sense enough not to call these great men. Careful analysis will show, in every case, that it requires service for one's fellowmen to constitute a great man. The man who is working for greatness alone is the man who ordinarily never achieves it.

October Twenty-fifth

Religion can be not only not divorced from life, but it cannot be divorced from every thought and act and detail of everyday, hour, and moment of life. It is the guiding principle, the guiding, permeating force, and not something that can ever be apart from everyday life.

October Twenty-sixth

There is an especial duty at middle age to sow the right seed thoughts that will make the latter period of life as beautiful and as attractive as it can be made. To keep always a youthful interest in all things of life, and an interest in all things in the lives of all about us, leads in an easy and natural manner to that delightful old age that should be the ambition and the pride of all who are permitted to pass into it.

When we examine the matter carefully, and when we realize that all knowledge and growth and development and character are cumulative, it would seem that the latter years of life should be the most joyous, and valuable, and happy of all. Its joys and its valued possessions come undoubtedly through living always in the upper strata of one's being. Browning was unquestionably the prophet when he wrote:

"Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life for which the first was made;

Our times are in his hand

Who saith, 'A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid!'"

October Twenty-seventh

To win the best in life it is necessary that we have a definite type and manner of thought. It is necessary that we have some more or less definite plan, and some manner of equipment for its accomplishment. It isn't necessary that we have all the details of the plan, nor even all the details of equipment, in order to make the start — some, many of these can be gained along the way if we are in earnest.

October Twenty-eighth

Someone has said, "There are two things in this life for which we are never fully prepared, and they are twins." But the philosophical mother or father, or aunt, or grandmother, is the one who is happy even when they come. "Cheerfulness and content," said Dickens, "are great beautifiers and are great preservers of youthful looks." It is true in a double sense that twins, as by and by they grow to the state of manhood or womanhood, will take a special pride in parents that if not always the pink of perfection in beauty, are noted for their youthful looks.

October Twenty-ninth

When the middle life is reached, care must be taken that we do not allow the affairs of life and our own particular field of activity, with its many times complex relationships, ever to divorce us from living in the Kingdom of the Mind, and the Realm of the Imagination.

If one has missed the early education, he need not be barred, unless perchance he himself so chooses, from that great and magnificent company of the world's thinkers and writers — companionship and intimacy with whom will make a man rich in thought, learning, and even in culture. It depends upon ourselves entirely whether we have this royal companionship or not.

October Thirtieth

Life in no case is purely a bed of roses. There will be always the daily problems; there will be bread to get; or if it is not a bread problem, then there will be wisdom necessary, and perplexing problems to meet in the wise use of one's wealth. There will be disillusions; there will be suffering; there will be death; but the great beauty is that those who are in earnest and those who build on the great realities of life, for them there will be a wisdom that will enable them to meet all these things with understanding and power, and always, therefore, with a due compensation.

October Thirty-first

The occasional vacation, or trip, or travel, or even short absence, in this way, contributes always to a greater happiness. But we must take the spirit of happiness with us; for unless we do, we will find it nowhere in the world, however far or varied we may travel in search for it. "After all," says Lowell, "the kind of world one carries about within oneself is the important thing, and the world outside takes all its grace, colour and value from that."

November

November First

Generally speaking it is idle for one to think that he would be happier in some other state or condition. It is however true that we need changes. We need changes from the ordinary duties and routine of life that we may get away from the beaten path, or sometimes, if you please, out of the ruts that we are all so likely to get running in.

It is good for us occasionally to get away from our constant companions, our constant friends, from the members of our immediate households. It is good for us and it is good for them. It whets the dull edge of appetite. We come back revived, with fresh and many times new interests and aims. We appreciate them better, and they appreciate us better for these changes. It takes the cobwebs from our brains. It takes the kinks from our nerves, and many times thereby, from our acts.

November Second

It is a curious or rather an interesting thing that the only people whom Jesus had anything to say against, the only ones whom he ever denounced, were those who observed the outward forms of the established religion of his time, but "did" their neighbours whenever they had the opportunity, some even chronically.

Those who oppressed, those who took advantage, those who were always looking to their own personal, social, or financial interests and gain alone, he denounced in the most scathing terms as hypocrites and vipers, those who "bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do for to be seen of men."

It is very easy and very common for us to be either hypocrites or thoroughly self-deluded, also in our day.

November Third

Reputation for strict integrity and reliability in business is one of the greatest assets that a businessman can have. There have been innumerable cases when it has been worth more than any amount of capital. The businessman who has been short-sighted enough at some time to have forfeited this element, appreciates perhaps more than anyone else the cost that this forfeiting has been to him.

November Fourth

We must never get away from the fact, even at the risk of repetition, that the life is the thing — that to fail or to fall down in it is the great failure. To fail in it is to fail completely, even though we may succeed, and even brilliantly, in some contingent or some accessory of it. So no man can become marooned in a one-sided development, or do a sharp practice, or live a dwarfing, self-centred life without definitely contributing to the failure of life.

We can never afford to sacrifice, to chance, the future for the temporary or the apparent present gain. No man can afford, even for his own good, to do a crooked act or take a short cut that is dishonest, or dishonourable, or questionable. The straight thing pays always in the end, in friendship, in business, in politics, in every conceivable avenue and phase of life.

November Fifth

At the bottom of all attainment is self-mastery. There is very little of any marked quality or that is of any lasting nature, that can be accomplished without this underlying foundation.

November Sixth

Sweetness of nature, simplicity in manners and conduct, humility without self-abasement, give the truly kingly quality to men, the queenly to women, the winning to children, whatever the rank or the station may be. The life dominated by this characteristic, or rather these closely allied characteristics, is a natural wellspring of joy to itself and sheds a continual benediction upon all who come within the scope of its influence. It makes for a life of great beauty in itself, and it imparts courage and hope and buoyancy to all others.

November Seventh

And why should there be anything but simplicity on the part of even the greatest? There will be due humility in it by and by; everything here will come to naught; and after its separation from the body the life will pass on into the next state, taking with it only, by way of desirable possessions, all attainment made through the unfoldment of its higher self, all that it has gained by way of self-mastery and nobility of character — and of these attributes none are more enduring, as well as more to be desired, than kindness and humility.

Truly descriptive of the well-balanced man are these lines of Lowell:

"The wisest man could ask no more of fate

Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,

Safe from the many, honoured by the few;

Nothing to crave in Church or World or State,

But inwardly in secret to be great."

The one who has true inward greatness thinks little of and cares less for what we term fame. For truly, "Fame means nothing to those who take an inward view of life, for they see that at best it is but the symbol of intrinsic worth."

November Eighth

It is an established fact that the training of the intellect alone is not sufficient. Nothing in this world can be truer than that the education of the head, without the training of the heart, simply increases one's power for evil, while the education of the heart, along with the head, increases one's power for good, and this, indeed, is the true education.

Clearly, we must begin with the child. The lessons learned in childhood are the last to be forgotten. Let them be taught that the lower animals are God's creatures, as they themselves are, put here by a common Heavenly Father, each for its own special purpose, and that they have the same right to life and protection. Let them be taught that principle recognized by all noble-hearted men, that it is only a depraved, debased, and cowardly nature that will injure an inferior, defenceless creature, simply because it is in its power to do so, and that there is no better, no grander test of true bravery and nobility of character than one's treatment of the lower animals.

November Ninth

I cannot refrain in this connection from quoting the following which was sent me by a kind friend to our fellow-creatures a few days ago:

"The celebrated Russian novelist, Turgenieff, tells a most touching incident from his own life, which awakened in him sentiments that have coloured all his writings with a deep and tender feeling.

"When Turgenieff was a boy of ten his father took him out one day bird-shooting. As they tramped across the brown stubble, a golden pheasant rose with a low whirr from the ground at his feet, and, with the joy of a sportsman throbbing through his veins, he raised his gun and fired, wild with excitement when the creature fell fluttering at his side. Life was ebbing fast, but the instinct of the mother was stronger than death itself, and with a feeble flutter of her wings the mother bird reached the nest where her young brood were huddled, unconscious of danger. Then, with such a look of pleading and reproach that his heart stood still at the ruin he had wrought, — and never to his dying day did he forget the feeling of cruelty and guilt that came to him in that moment, — the little brown head toppled over, and only the dead body of the mother shielded her nestlings.

“'Father, father,' he cried, 'what have I done?' as he turned his horror-stricken face to his father. But not to his father's eye had this little tragedy been enacted, and he said: 'Well done, my son; that was well done for your first shot. You will soon be a fine sportsman.'

“'Never, father; never again shall I destroy any living creature. If that is sport, I will have none of it. Life is more beautiful than death, and since I cannot give life, I will not take it.'"

And so instead of putting into the hands of the child a gun or any other weapon that may be instrumental in crippling, torturing, or taking the life of even a single animal, I would give him the field-glass and the camera, and send him out to be a friend to the animals, to observe and study their characteristics, their habits, to learn from them those wonderful lessons that can be learned, and thus have his whole nature expand in admiration and love and care for them, and become thereby the truly manly and princely type of man, rather than the careless, callous, brutal type.

November Tenth

All sin and error, all wrong and injustice, with its attendant suffering and loss, is the result of selfishness. Selfishness is always the result of ignorance — a mind undeveloped or developed only in spots. Therefore to aid in bringing one to a realization of his higher and better self and the laws that operate there, that he may act and live continually from that centre, is after all the effective and the fundamentally common sense way of aiding in righting the wrongs that help in warping, in crippling, the happiness and the sweetness that belong inherently to every life.

When the highest speaks to the highest in another, sooner or later the response is sure. In this way birth is given to ever-widening circles of influence that make for the good, the honest, the righteous, therefore the happy, in this at times hard and complex, but on the whole, good old world of ours.

November Eleventh

Now and then there is one so steeped in selfishness, so ignorant therefore of the prevailing laws of life, that it is necessary to take the power of oppression or injustice out of his hands, at least for the time being; but the springs of tenderness, of compassion, of love for the right, though sometimes deeply covered or apparently non-existent, can be made in time to burst forth and to overflow by the truly wise, so that even such may in time, as has so often and so abundantly been the case, become one of the noblest, one of the most valuable, of earth's sons or daughters.

November Twelfth

To grow and to keep in person as attractive as possible should be not only everyone's pleasure, but should be also everyone's duty.

November Thirteenth

It was not merely a poetic fancy, but the recognition of a fundamental fact, as well-known laws of modern psychology, mental and spiritual science are now clearly demonstrating, that induced the Prophet to say: "And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn to the left." And again: "The Lord in the midst of thee is mighty." And still again: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

November Fourteenth

We are told by the mariners who sail on the Indian Seas, that many times they can tell their approach to certain islands long before they can see them, by the sweet fragrance of the sandalwood that is wafted far out upon the deep. Do you not see how it would serve to have such a soul playing through such a body that as you go here and there a subtle, silent force goes out from you that all feel and are influenced by; so that you carry with you an inspiration and continually shed a benediction wherever you go; so that your friends and all people will say — His coming brings peace and joy into our homes, welcome his coming; so that as you pass along the street, tired, and weary, and even sin-sick men and women will feel a certain divine touch that will awaken new desires and a new life in them; that will make the very horse as you pass him turn his head with a strange, half-human, longing look? Such are the subtle powers of the human soul when it makes itself translucent to the Divine.

November Fifteenth

Politics is something that we cannot evade except to the detriment of our country and thereby to our own detriment. Politics is but another word for government. And in a sense, we the individual voter, are the government, and unless we make matters of government our own concern, there are organizations and there are groups of designing men who will steal in and get possession for their own selfish aggrandizement and gain. This takes sometimes the form of power, to be traded for other power, or concessions; but always if you will trace far enough, eventual money

gain. Or again it takes the form of graft and even direct loot.

The losses that are sustained through a lowered citizenship, through inefficient service, through a general debauchery of public institutions, through increased taxation to make up for the amounts that are drawn off in graft and loot are well-nigh incalculable — and for the sole reason that you and I, average citizens, do not take the active personal interest in our own matters of government that we should take.

Clericalism, Tammanyism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism — and all in the guise of interest in the people — get their holds and their profits in this way. It is essential that we be locally wise and history wise. Any class or section or organization that is less than the nation itself must be watched and must be made to keep its own place, or it becomes a menace to the free and larger life of the nation.

Even in the case of a great national crisis a superior patriotism is affected and paraded in order that it may camouflage its other and real activities.

November Sixteenth

It is only when you and I and all average men fully comprehend the moral obligation that is contained in the phrase, Independence in party action, that we will see the power of corruption that they now hold slipping from their hands. It is when we not only make it known by quick and decisive action that we will support our own party when its platform is essentially the best and when it is constructed for the purpose of being fulfilled and not for the pure purpose of deception, in whole or in part, and again when its candidates are the best men that can be named; but that we will as quickly support the opposing party when platform and candidates in it are the better, that we will give birth to a revolution of tremendous import in our political and social traditions and life.

Then when we are able to get away from the idea that government is something separate and apart from us, but that in a very fundamental sense we are government so to speak, and when we set about doing for ourselves that which we now hand over to others to be done for us, and many times illy and treacherously done, we will have political institutions of which we and all men will be justly and unreservedly proud.

November Seventeenth

We can't dwell too continually in the lower stories of our being without missing the still better things that are in the stories above. And somehow there is in the very centre of our being, so to speak, a something that continually beckons us above.

November Eighteenth

We need a stock-taking and a mobilization of our spiritual forces. But what, after all, does this mean? Search as we may we are brought back every time to this same Man of Nazareth, the God-man — Son of Man and Son of God. And gathering it into a few brief sentences it is this: Jesus' great revelation was the consciousness of God in the individual life, and to this he witnessed in a supreme and masterly way, because this he supremely realized and lived. Faith in him and following him does not mean acquiring some particular notion of God or some particular belief about him himself. It is the living in one's own life of this same consciousness of God as one's source and Father, and a living in these same filial relations with him of love and guidance and care that Jesus entered into and continuously lived.

When this is done there is no problem and no condition in the individual life that it will not clarify, mould, and therefore take care of; for — do not worry about your life — was the Master's clear-cut command. Are we ready for this high type of spiritual adventure? Not only are we assured of this great and mighty truth that the Master revealed and going ahead of us lived, that under this supreme guidance we need not worry about the things of the life, but that under this Divine guidance we need not think even of the life itself, if for any reason it becomes our duty or our privilege to lay it down. Witnessing for truth and standing for truth he again preceded us in this.

November Nineteenth

When the day with its fresh beginning comes, we should enter upon it without fears or forebodings. These will inevitably cripple our energies, and thereby cripple or even defeat our day.

November Twentieth

We no longer admit that Christ is present and at work only when a minister is expounding the gospel or some theological precept or conducting some ordained observance in the pulpit; or that religion is only when it is labelled as such and is within the walls of a church. That belonged to the chapter in Christianity that is now rapidly closing, a chapter of good works and results — but so pitiably below its possibilities. So pitiably below because men had been taught and without sufficient thought accepted the teaching that to be a Christian was to hold certain beliefs about the Christ that had been formulated by early groups of men and that had come down through the centuries.

The chapter that is now opening upon the world is the one that puts Christ's own teachings in the simple, frank, and direct manner in which he gave them, to the front. It makes life, character, conduct, human concern and human service of greater importance than mere matters of opinion. It makes eager and unremitting work for the establishing of the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of right relations between men, here on this earth, the essential thing.

It insists that the telling test as to whether a man is a Christian is how much of the Christ spirit is in evidence in his life — and in every phase of his life. Gripped by this idea which for a long time the forward-looking and therefore the big men in them have been striving for, our churches in the main are moving forward with a new, a dauntless, and a powerful appeal.

November Twenty-first

It is primarily among the ignorant and illiterate that Bolshevism, anarchy, political rings, and every agency that attempts through self-seeking to sow the seeds of discontent, treachery, and disloyalty, works to exploit them and to herd them for political ends. No man can have that respect for himself, or feel that he has the respect due him from others as an honest and diligent worker, whatever his line of work, who is handicapped by the lack of an ordinary education.

The heart of the American nation is sound. Through universal free public education it must be on the alert and be able to see through Bourbonism and understand its methods on the one hand, and Bolshevism on the other; and be determined through intelligent action to see that American soil is made uncongenial to both.

November Twenty-second

Our time needs again more the prophet and less the priest. It needs the God-impelled life and voice of the prophet with his face to the future, both God-ward and man-ward, burning with an undivided devotion to truth and righteousness. It needs less the priest, too often with his back to the future and too often the pliant tool of the organization whose chief concern is, and ever has been, the preservation of itself under the ostensible purpose of the preservation of the truth once delivered, the same that Jesus with his keen powers of penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high moral guide and as an inspirer to high and unself-centred endeavour, and that he characterized with such scathing scorn. There are splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now even as it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not a system; with righteousness, not custom; with justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare say that if Christianity — the Christianity of the Christ — had been actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would.

We need again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us back to those simple fundamental teachings of the Christ of Nazareth, that are life-giving to the individual, and that are world-saving.

November Twenty-third

Each morning is a fresh beginning in life. In a sense there is no past, no future. Wise is he who takes today and lives it, and tomorrow when it comes — but not before it comes. The past is of value only by way of the lessons it has brought us. There should be no regrets or crippled energies that result from such. We have stumbled — all have stumbled. The wise one is he who does not allow himself to be discouraged in the face of even innumerable stumblings. Sometimes it is through these that we learn the most.

The wise one is he who when he stumbles, and falls — even flat — gives time enough to recognize the cause, who quickly learns his lesson, and who then picks himself up and goes on, without wasting even a moment in regret. In this way his very stumblings and fallings become an asset.

November Twenty-fourth

The one who takes sufficient time in the quiet mentally to form his ideals, sufficient time to make and to keep continually his conscious connection with the Infinite, with the Divine life and forces, is the one who is best adapted to the strenuous life. He it is who can go out and deal with sagacity and power with whatever issues may arise in the affairs of everyday life. He it is who is building not for the years, but for the centuries, not for time, but for the eternities. And he can go out knowing not whither he goes, knowing that the Divine life within him will never fail him, but will lead him on until he beholds the Father face to face.

He is building for the centuries because only that which is the highest, the truest, the noblest, and best will abide the test of the centuries. He is building for eternity because when the transition we call death takes place, life, character, self-mastery, divine self-realization, — the only things that the soul when stripped of everything else takes with it, — he has in abundance. In life, or when the time of the transition to another form of life comes, he is never afraid, never fearful, because he knows and realizes that behind him, within him, beyond him, is the Infinite wisdom and love; and in this he is eternally centred, and from it he can never be separated. With Whittier he sings:

"I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care."

November Twenty-fifth

Faith is nothing more nor less than the operation of the thought forces in the form of an earnest desire, coupled with expectation as to its fulfilment. And in the degree that faith, the earnest desire thus sent out, is continually held to and watered by firm expectation, in just that degree does it either draw to itself, or does it change from the unseen into the visible, from the spiritual into the material, that for which it is sent.

November Twenty-sixth

Jesus did not teach a system — he taught no system at all — or anything that can be legitimately transformed into a system that would do violence to men's — good men's reason.

Personally I believe, and I stand squarely upon the belief, that the great life-moulding principles and truths that Jesus so unerringly perceived, lived, and taught — of man's wonderful access to God the Father, and of the mystic force that relates and unites them, and of the transforming and redeeming, and more, the building power of love, are so much greater and so infinitely more valuable than the ecclesiastical dogmas that grew up about his person, that I rejoice to see the falling away of the latter whereby the ground is being made less encumbered and made ready for the essential truths that will yet redeem men and women to their higher, diviner selves, and through them will yet redeem the world.

Jesus did not teach that God is a monster, and therefore its concomitant, the inherent sinfulness and degradation of man and of human nature. He perceived unerringly, he lived and he taught — Our Father in Heaven, the unity of the human spirit with the Divine. It was therefore the Divinity of Man, made actual in the degree that man lifts his mind and his spirit up to the Divine and lives in this realization — with all the transcendent and transforming insights and powers and the enfolding peace that will follow, and follow inevitably, in its train.

November Twenty-seventh

In our mental lives we can either keep hold of the rudder and so determine exactly what course we take, what points we touch, or we can fail to do this, and failing, we drift, and are blown hither and thither by every passing breeze.

November Twenty-eighth

To know God whom the Christ revealed, and to know him in the manner as by him revealed, is to become happy and strong in the conscious actualizing of the Divine leadings and forces and powers that are potential within us, but that the Christ revealed and explicitly enjoined upon us to realize and use. And so intelligent men and women of today are finding that to attempt to encompass the life, the teachings, and therefore the religion of the Christ, in cut and dried formulas, to weave them into a crown and to press them upon men's brows, is the very antithesis of the Christ.

They now see all too clearly that through this method a Christianity primarily of negation was made to take the place of a religion of faith and courage and of joyous conquering power — a religion of wholeness and of abounding health of mind, body, and spirit.

November Twenty-ninth

In his great work: "The Education of Man," Friedrich Froebel has said: "It is the destiny and life-work of all things to unfold their essence, hence their divine being, and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself — to reveal God in their external and transient being. It is the special destiny and life-work of man, as an intelligent and rational being, to become fully, vividly, and clearly conscious of his essence, of the divine effluence in him, and, therefore, of God.... By education, then, the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness, and man himself raised into free, conscious obedience to the divine principle that lives in him, and to a free representation of this principle in his life."

November Thirtieth

“I am thine own Spirit,” are the words that the Infinite Intelligence, by means of the inner voice, is continually speaking to every human soul. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion." Man therefore is essentially Divine, part and parcel of the Infinite Life, and so essentially good, and with the divine attributes and powers potential within him.

It is ours to live in this consciousness after we once realize it, and thus to allow the God consciousness to fill us and to flow through us in all phases of our human existence.

December

December First

It was the highly illumined German philosopher, Fichte, who said: "God alone is, and nothing besides him — a principle which, it seems to me, may be easily comprehended, and which is the indispensable condition of all religious insight.... An insight into the absolute unity of the Human Existence with the Divine is certainly the profoundest Knowledge that man can attain."

December Second

At this present time the spirit of the Christ is moving in a wonderful manner in the minds and hearts of men everywhere. Jesus is coming to his own again, and the great laity of the world is having its part, in conjunction with the forward-looking men in all our churches, in the great redeeming process that is now in progress.

We are in the midst, whether we are yet fully able to grasp it or not, of another great Reformation, no less real, no less gigantic than any that has gone before, and more tremendously far-reaching. It is but the forerunner of a great spiritual — Christian, if you please — Renaissance, that will resemble more than anything else the times of the Early Christianity — but with a vastly enlarged vision and knowledge and influence.

December Third

So men and women who can look bigly and kindly at many of the things in our organized Christianity of today, things that they feel are keeping the truer and the more vital and the more wholesome portions of the Christianity of the Christ away from the people, are recognizing them as pertaining to the old and now creaking stairway up which we have slowly climbed.

They are, on the other hand however, recognizing that it is but well and healthy, indeed essential, for all men — in church and out of church — to become acquainted with early beginnings, with pre-mediaeval tamperings and speculations and teachings about the Christ, which remain essentially dominant to this day, in order that the far more valuable thing, the teachings and the gospel of the Christ, may again gain the ascendancy, and do for hungering and thirsting men what the Christ so explicitly said they would do.

December Fourth

Nowhere can we find from Jesus' own teachings that he claimed for himself anything that he claimed not for all mankind. Nor could it be otherwise if God is God and Law is Law.

There is, of course, a difference — but it is a difference in capacity of realization, and as to how fully one in his inner consciousness and in the whole outward expression of his life, is capable of trusting, and through his love and his will, is ready to trust himself to the Divine Law. Completely and with all humility, Jesus did this. A sense of dependence upon the Divine guidance and power gives that appropriate humility which is always combined in those of real wisdom and power. It is a part of their life; it is indeed a part of their power.

In all his thought and in all his acts Jesus gave allegiance and acknowledgment to this guidance and power — Of myself I can do nothing; it is the Father that worketh in me.

December Fifth

Thrice blessed are they who are pleasant to live with. They are a blessing to themselves, to those with whom they live, and to the world at large. Along this line a thoughtful writer has said most truly: "There is a beautiful and an ugly way in which to say almost everything, and happiness depends upon which way we take. You can upset a person for a whole day by the harsh way in which you may call him in the morning, or you may give him a beautiful start by the cheeriness of your greeting. So not only in the words but in all the little, common courtesies and duties of life, think of the beautiful way of doing each."

December Sixth

Contemplation to be followed by activity and creative effort, brings a balance to life that would otherwise be one-sided and productive of one-sided results, which always means loss in some form.

December Seventh

The life invariably follows the thought. In the last analysis it is cause and effect — the thoughts and the emotions are the silent, subtle, but all powerful causes, of the prevailing characteristics and conditions of any life. The thoughts and the emotions therefore determine the life. They stamp its present and they will inevitably determine its future.

There are people by the thousands today who are awakening to this important fact, who are grasping and utilizing the laws of scientific mind and body building, and who through the agency of these laws are stepping so to speak into a new world. They are exchanging fears and forebodings with their neutralizing and destructive influences, for faith and hope and courage, with their straight-to-the-mark, get-some-where influences. They are exchanging disease for bodily health and strength and vigour. They are exchanging poverty with its attendant limitations for plenty and abundance.

They are finding that life when we get at it from the right side, is something intensely interesting in all its details; that it is something, everyday of which is to be lived and enjoyed, and not something merely to get through with. They by the renewing of their minds and thereby their lives, are becoming definite, distinctive forces in the world.

December Eighth

When Elijah was on the mountain it was after the various physical commotions and manifestations that he heard the "still, small voice," the voice of his own soul, through which the Infinite God was speaking. If we will but follow this voice of intuition, it will speak ever more clearly and more plainly, until by and by it will be absolute and unerring in its guidance. The great trouble with us is that we do not listen to and do not follow this voice within our own souls, and so we become as a house divided against itself. We are pulled this way and that, and we are never certain of anything.

In order for the highest wisdom and insight we must have absolute confidence in the Divine guiding us, but not through the channel of someone else.

December Ninth

The very purpose of Christianity is changing — it is changing from an agency whose reason for being and whose purpose has been primarily to save men's souls from hell, real or mythical or both, to an agency whose reason for being and whose purpose is to inspire and to direct men so that their lives do not here get into a state of hell. In other words, it is no longer regarded by thinking and knowing men and women as a mere creeping-through agency, but as a constructive and building force in their daily lives.

They are also firm in their conviction, through their knowledge of the workings of the elemental law of Cause and Effect, that the one who knows God here and gives evidence that he knows Him by an upright, manly, loving, serviceable mode of living, will be known by God both here and hereafter.

They are also sustained in their conviction because this is the essential teaching of the Christ, who has led them into the knowledge of the Way, and who traversed it before he taught it. With such a one, receiving directly from the Master a knowledge of the great spiritual verities of life, and whose constant prayer is — Uphold me, God, by Thy free Spirit— "the hitting of a sawdust trail" becomes a most immaterial matter.

December Tenth

Great and rapidly-increasing numbers in our own and in other countries, who are through with the old ecclesiasticism of authority with its dogmas of the inherent sinfulness and degradation of man, whose soul it is the business of religion to save by some un-understood atoning force, with its emphasis on the negatives of life, which induce always fear and lack of faith and therefore crippled energies for mind, body, and spirit, are realizing and realizing keenly the great loss they have sustained through the old emphasis in religion.

They are now finding that to know God, whom the Christ revealed, gives a religion of a joyous, conquering power by virtue of the Divine powers and forces, eternally latent within, springing forward into a useful and ever-growing activity.

December Eleventh

Full, rich, and abounding health is the normal and the natural condition of life. Anything else is an abnormal condition, and abnormal conditions as a rule come through perversions.

God never created sickness, suffering, and disease; they are man's own creations. They come through his violating the laws under which he lives.

December Twelfth

It is the material that is the transient, the temporary; and the mental and spiritual that is the real and the eternal. We should not become slaves to habit. The material alone can never bring happiness — much less satisfaction. These lie deeper. That conversation between Jesus and the rich young man is full of significance for us all, especially in this ambitious, striving, restless age.

Abundance of life is determined not alone by one's material possessions, but primarily by one's riches of mind and spirit. A world of truth is contained in these words: "Life is what we are alive to. It is not a length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, mere luxury or idleness, pride or money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, and music, flowers, God and eternal hopes, is to be all but dead."

Why be so eager to gain possession of the hundred thousand or the half-million acres, or so many millions of dollars? Soon, and it may be before you realize it, all must be left. It is as if a man made it his ambition to accumulate a thousand or a hundred thousand automobiles. All soon will become junk.

But so it is with all material things beyond what we can actually and profitably use for our good and the good of others — and that we actually do so use.

December Thirteenth

In true growth and development there is never any giving up: for what we gain is always of far greater value even for real enjoyment than that which we leave.

December Fourteenth

MAN can eat just so many meals during the year or during life. If he tries to eat more he suffers thereby. He can wear only so many suits of clothing; if he tries to wear more, he merely wears himself out taking off and putting on.

Again it is as Jesus said: "For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?" And right there is the crux of the whole matter. All the time spent in accumulating these things beyond the reasonable amount, is so much taken from the life — from the things of the mind and the spirit. It is in the development and the pursuit of these that all true satisfaction lies. Elemental law has so decreed.

We have made wonderful progress, or rather have developed wonderful skill in connection with things. We need now to go back and catch up the thread and develop like skill in making the life.

December Fifteenth

It is the threefold life and development that is wanted, — physical, mental, spiritual. This gives the rounded life, and he or she who fails in any one comes short of the perfect whole. The physical has its uses just the same and is just as important as the others. The great secret of the highly successful life is, however, to infuse the mental and the physical with the spiritual; in other words, to spiritualize all, and so raise all to the highest possibilities and powers.

It is the all-round, fully developed we want, — not the ethereal, pale-blooded man and woman, but the man and woman of flesh and blood, for action and service here and now, — the man and woman strong and powerful, with all the faculties and functions fully unfolded and used, all in a royal and bounding condition, but all rightly subordinated. The man and the woman of this kind, with the imperial hand of mastery upon all, — standing, moving thus like a king, nay, like a very God, — such is the man and such is the woman of power. Such is the ideal life; anything else is one-sided.

December Sixteenth

Subtle and powerful are the influences of the mind in the building and rebuilding of the body. As we understand them better it may become the custom for people to look forward with pleasure to the teens of their second century.

December Seventeenth

Thought needs direction to be effective, and upon this, effective results depend as much as upon the force itself. This brings us to the will. Will is not, as is so often thought, a force in itself; will is the directing power. Thought is the force. Will gives direction. Thought scattered gives the weak, the uncertain, the vacillating, the aspiring, but the never-doing, the I-would-like-to, but the get-no-where, the attain-to-nothing man or woman.

Thought steadily directed by the will gives the strong, the firm, the never-yielding, the never-know-defeat man or woman, the man or woman who uses the very difficulties and hindrances that would dishearten the ordinary person, as stones with which he paves a way over which he triumphantly walks, who, by the very force he carries with him, so neutralizes and transmutes the very obstacles that would bar his way that they fall before him, and in turn aid him on his way; the man or woman who, like the eagle, uses the very contrary wind that would thwart his flight, that would turn him and carry him in the opposite direction, as the very agency upon which he mounts and mounts and mounts, until actually lost to the human eye, and which, in addition to thus aiding him, brings to him an ever fuller realization of his own powers, or in other words, an ever greater power.

December Eighteenth

I am well aware of the fact that the mere accumulation of wealth is not, except in very rare cases, the controlling motive in the lives of our wealthy men of affairs. It is rather the joy and the satisfaction of achievement. But nevertheless it is possible, as has so often proved, to get so much into a habit and thereby into a rut, that one becomes a victim of habit; and the life with all its superb possibilities of human service, and therefore of true greatness, becomes side-tracked and abortive. There are so many different lines of activity for human betterment for children, for men and women, that those of great executive and financial ability have wonderful opportunities.

December Nineteenth

If you would find the highest, the fullest, and the richest life that not only this world but that any world can know, then do away with the sense of the separateness of your life from the life of God.

December Twentieth

Farmer, tilling your soil, gathering your crops, caring for your herds; you are helping feed the world. There is nothing more important.

"Who digs a well, or plants a seed,

A sacred pact he keeps with sun and sod;

With these he helps refresh and feed.

The world, and enters partnership with God."

If you do not allow yourself to become a slave to your work, and if you cooperate within the house and the home so that your wife and your daughters do not become slaves or near-slaves, what an opportunity is yours of high thinking and noble living! The more intelligent you become, the better read, the greater the interest you take in community and public affairs, the more effectively you become what in reality and jointly you are — the backbone of this and of every nation.

December Twenty-first

Teacher, poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk, college head, Mayor, Governor, President, Ruler — the effectiveness of your work and the satisfaction in your work will be determined by the way in which you relate your thought and your work to the Divine plan, and co-ordinate your every activity in reference to the highest welfare of the greater whole.

December Twenty-second

This growing sense of personal responsibility, and still better, of personal interest, this giving of one's abilities and one's time, in addition to ones means, is the beginning of the fulfilment of what I have long thought: namely, the great gain that will accrue to numberless communities and to the nation, when men of great means, men of great business and executive ability, give of their time and their abilities for the accomplishment of those things for the public welfare that otherwise would remain undone, or that would remain unduly delayed.

What a gain will result also to those who so do in the joy and satisfaction resulting from this higher type of accomplishment hallowed by the undying element of human service!

You keep silent too much. "Have great leaders, and the rest will follow," said Whitman. The gift of your abilities while you live would be of priceless worth for the establishing and the maintenance of a fairer, a healthier, and a sweeter life in your community, your city, your country.

December Twenty-third

Greatness comes always through human service. As there is no such thing as finding happiness by searching for it directly, so there is no such thing as achieving greatness by seeking it directly.

It comes not primarily through brilliant intellect, great talents, but primarily through the heart. It is determined by the way that brilliant intellect, great talents are used. It is accorded not to those who seek it directly. By an indirect law it is accorded to those who, forgetting self, give and thereby lose their lives in human service.

December Twenty-fourth

We are all continually giving out influences similar to those that are playing in our own lives. We do this in the same way that each flower emits its own peculiar odour. The rose breathes out its fragrance upon the air and all who come near it are refreshed and inspired by this emanation from the soul of the rose. A poisonous weed sends out its obnoxious odour; it is neither refreshing nor inspiring in its effects, and if one remain near it long, he may be so unpleasantly affected as to be made even ill by it.

The higher the life the more inspiring and helpful are the emanations that it is continually sending out. The lower the life the more harmful is the influence it continually sends out to all who come in contact with it. Each one is continually radiating an atmosphere of one kind or the other.

December Twenty-fifth

Fear and worry have the effect of closing up the channels of the body, so that the life forces flow in a slow and sluggish manner. Hope and tranquillity open the channels of the body, so that the life forces go bounding through it in such a way that disease can rarely get a foothold.

December Twenty-sixth

All things, good in themselves, are for use and enjoyment; but all things must be rightly used in order that there may be full and lasting enjoyment. A law written into the very fibre of human life, so to speak, is to the effect that excesses, the abuse of anything good in itself, will end disastrously, so that one's pleasures and enjoyments will have to be gathered up for repairs, or perchance his shattered mind or body also, and in case of the latter then the former will have to bide their time or wait indefinitely for their resumption.

Look where we will, in or out and around us, we will find that it is the middle ground — neither poverty nor excessive riches, good wholesome use without license, a turning into the by-ways along the main road where innocent and healthy God-sent and God-intended pleasures and enjoyments are to be found; but never getting far enough away to lose sight of the road itself. The middle ground it is that the wise man or woman plants foot upon.

December Twenty-seventh

Love it is that brings order out of chaos, that becomes the solvent of the riddle of life, and however cynical, skeptical, or practical we may think at times we may be, a little quiet clearcut thought will bring us each time back to the truth that it is the essential force that leads away from the tooth and the claw of the jungle, that lifts life up from and above the clod.

Love is the world's balance-wheel; and as the warming and ennobling element of sympathy, care and consideration radiates from it, increasing one's sense of mutuality, which in turn leads to fellowship, cooperation, brotherhood, a holy and diviner conception and purpose of life is born, that makes human life more as it should be, as it must be — as it will be.

December Twenty-eighth

I love to feel that when one makes glad the heart of any man, woman, child, or animal, he makes glad the heart of God — and I somehow feel that it is true.

As our household fires radiate their genial warmth, and make more joyous and more liveable the lot of all within the household walls, so life in its larger scope and in all its human relations, becomes more genial and more liveable and reveals more abundantly the deeper riches of its diviner nature, as it is made more open and more obedient to the higher powers of mind and spirit.

December Twenty-ninth

Do you know that incident in connection with the little Scottish girl? She was trudging along, carrying as best she could a boy younger, but it seemed almost as big as she herself, when one remarked to her how heavy he must be for her to carry, when instantly came the reply: "He's na heavy. He's mi brither." Simple is the incident; but there is in it a truth so fundamental that pondering upon it, it is enough to make many a man, to whom dogma or creed make no appeal, a Christian — and a mighty engine for good in the world. And more — there is in it a truth so fundamental and so fraught with potency and with power, that its wider recognition and projection into all human relations would reconstruct a world.

December Thirtieth

And again, each morning is a fresh beginning. The way we meet our problems and do our work today determines all — and then tomorrow when it comes, but not before it comes. This is really the secret of all successful living.

And as the days and the years speed onward, abundant helps will spring up all along the way to meet whatever conditions or problems arise. They will be waiting, and ready to help us to meet them with wisdom and with power, and to get from them the best there is in them.

And when the summons comes to join the "innumerable company," it will find us ready. Joyfully we will slip out of the old coat, and eagerly put on the new. We will not be afraid or even reluctant, realizing that we are now living in God's life, and that there we shall live forever. We will therefore extend a welcoming hand to the messenger, knowing that he can bring us only good. We will go even with joy, expecting that Swedenborg was right, when he taught that those who have been nearest in spirit and therefore dearest to us here, are the divinely appointed ones to greet and to care for us and to instruct us, when we pass into the other phase of life.

December Thirty-first

IN BRIEF—

To be honest, to be fearless, to be just, joyous, kind. This will make our part in life's great and as yet not fully understood play one of greatest glory, and we need then stand in fear of nothing — life nor death; for death is life. Or rather perchance, it is the quick transition to life in another form; the putting off of the old coat and the putting on of the new: a passing not from light to darkness, but from light to light according as we have lived here; a taking up of life in another form where we leave it off here; a part in life not to be shunned or dreaded or feared, but to be welcomed with a glad and ready smile when it comes in its own good way and time.

I hope you enjoyed reading Through the Sunlit Year by Ralph Waldo Trine.

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Endnotes

Notes

[←1]

Henry Holt in "Cosmic Relations."

[←2]

The thought of the layman in practically all of our churches is much the same as that of Mr. Lloyd George when he said: "The Church to which I belong is torn with a fierce dispute; one part says it is baptism into the name of the Father, and the other that it is baptism in the name of the Father. I belong to one of these parties. I feel most strongly about this. I would die for it, but I forget which it is."

Table of Contents

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Endnotes