If you want a better position, more salary, money to pay off debts, or to get what you need, whatever it may be, cling with all the power of your mind to the thing you are trying to get, and never for a moment doubt you will get it. You do not inherit poverty, squalor. Lack and want have nothing whatever to do with G.o.d's children. Your inheritance is divine, grand, sublime. Poverty is a mental disease, and you carry the antidote to its poison in your mind. You owe it to the One who has given you life, health, who has given you brains to make something of yourself, to improve your situation.

As long as you keep yourself saturated with the poverty conviction you cannot rise out of poverty. You must think yourself out of it. "The Lord is my Shepherd, and I _cannot_ want." Hold that thought firmly and steadfastly in your mind. Believe it. Live up to it.

Abundance will never flow through pinched, doubting, poverty thoughts, any more than clear, crystal water can flow freely through foul, grease-clogged pipes. A right viewpoint must be your mental plumber to keep the connection open and free. Things of a kind attract one another.

The poverty thought attracts more poverty, the fear thought more fear, the worry thought more worry, the anxiety thought more anxiety. On the other hand, the faith thought, trust thought, and the confidence thought attract things like themselves.

Poverty is a disease that can only be cured by prosperity remedies. The prosperity thought is the natural antidote for the poverty germ. It kills it. The poverty thought cannot exist in the mind at the same moment with the prosperity thought. One will drive out the other. It rests with you which one you will harbor and encourage.

Cling to the consciousness of your oneness with the All-Supply. Keep the supply pipes between you and the Infinite Source of all good always open. Don't pinch them. Don't cut off the supply by the limiting poverty thought, the doubt thought, the fear thought, the worry thought. Keep your supply pipes open by great faith in your Father-Mother-G.o.d, who is more solicitous for your welfare than any human parent could be. Hold fast to the anchor of your union with the Infinite Life; keep in the current running G.o.dward and your life will not dry up or become barren, will not be blighted and blasted by the poverty drought.

The trouble with us is that we have been in the habit of looking for a material supply when our first supply must be mental. We keep the supply avenues open or we close them with our thoughts, our convictions. We materialize poverty by our doubting thoughts, by our fears of it. We are just beginning to find that we get out of this world what we think into it and work out of it, that our thought plan precedes its material realization just as the architect's plan precedes the building.

Remember that prosperity can not flow into your life while your mind is filled with poverty thoughts and convictions. We go in the direction of our thought and our convictions. By no law can you expect to get that which you do not believe you will get. Prosperity can not come to you if you are all the time driving it away from you by your poverty thought.

You must think in a positive determined way that you are going to succeed in whatever you desire to do or to be before you can expect success. That is the first condition by which you make yourself a magnet for the thing you are after. It doesn't matter whether it is work or money, a better position or health, or whatever else it is, your thoughts about it must be positive, clean cut, decisive, persistent. No weak, wobbly "Perhaps I may get it," or "Maybe it will come some time,"

or "I wonder if I shall get this," or "if I can do that" sort of thought will ever help you to get anything in this world or the next.

When young John Wanamaker started with a pushcart to deliver his first sale of clothing he turned on a positive current toward a merchant princeship. As he pa.s.sed big clothing stores he pictured himself as a great merchant, owner of a much bigger establishment than any of those he saw, and he did not neutralize or weaken this thought current by all sorts of doubts or fears as to the possibility of reaching the goal of his ambition.

Most people think too much about blindly forcing themselves ahead. They do not realize that they can, by the power of thought, make themselves magnets to draw to them the things that will help them to get on.

Wanamaker attracted to himself the forces that make a merchant prince.

Every step he took was forward, to match the vision of his advance with its reality.

Marshall Field projected himself mentally out of a little country store into a clerkship in Chicago. Then he thought and worked himself out of this clerkship into a partnership. Still thinking and climbing upward, he next visualized himself at the head of the greatest merchandizing establishment in America, if not in the world. His mind always ran ahead. He was always picturing himself a little higher up, a little further on, always visualizing a larger business, and so making himself a magnet for the things he sought.

If John Wanamaker had been satisfied with himself at the start he would have remained in his first little store in Philadelphia, and thus cut off all possibility of becoming what he is--one of the greatest merchants the world has ever seen. If Marshall Field had stopped thinking himself higher up when the man he worked for in the little Pittsfield store predicted that he never would succeed as a merchant, he never would have been heard from. But Deacon Davis's telling Marshall Field's father that the boy would not make a salesman in a thousand years did not stop him thinking himself ahead. "On to Chicago, the City of Opportunity," he said to himself, and on and up he went until the little country merchant who predicted his failure was a Lilliputian in comparison.

The story of each of these men is, so far as the success principle is concerned, the story of every man who has ever succeeded in his undertakings. They may not have been conscious of the law underlying their methods, but they worked in unison with it, and hence succeeded.

The same thing is true of Andrew Carnegie, and of all the millionaires and self-made men among us who have raised themselves from poor boys to the ownership of colossal fortunes, or to commanding positions in some phase of the world's activities.

Any one who makes the acc.u.mulation of a fortune his chief goal, and who has grit, determination, will power and sufficient faith in himself to stick to his purpose will get there. But long before the youth who chooses such a goal has reached it, he will have dwarfed his manhood, and shriveled his soul.

To get away from poverty is one thing; to set one's heart on money as the ultimate good is another, and quite a different, thing. There is a whole world of difference between so saturating one's mind with the thought of money and its acquisition that there is no room for any other aspiration, and the constant dwelling on the black and hopeless poverty thought, the incessant picturing yourself as a pauper until you are so convinced of poverty's hold on you that you destroy the very ability which should help you to get away from it.

People who are down and out financially are down and out mentally. They are suffering from a mental disease of discouragement and loss of hope.

There ought to be inst.i.tutions conducted by government experts for the treatment of these poverty sufferers, for they are just as much in need of it as are the inmates of our hospitals. They need advice from mental experts. They have lost their way on the life path, and need to be shown the way back. They need to be turned about mentally, so that they will face the light instead of the darkness. They should be shown that they are stopping up their prosperity pipes, cutting off their source of supply by their pinching, poverty-stricken, limiting thought. Their whole mental att.i.tude points toward failure, toward poverty, and by a natural law their outward conditions conform with the pictures they hold in mind.

This poverty disease could be cured in the case of the majority of down and outs, the failures, by proper mental treatments. If the people in the great failure army to-day could be shown that as long as they hold the poverty thought and go about with a sad, dejected expression on their faces, as though there were no hope in life for them, they will continue to be poor; but that if they will only turn about and face the sun, so that their shadows will fall behind them, their conditions will begin to improve, they would quickly take a new lease of life and courage. These mental prosperity treatments would generate in them a new hope that would cause them to brace up all along the line.

What a revelation would come to the poor people of the world if they would only eliminate from their minds for a single year the poverty thought; if they would erase from their minds poverty pictures and all the suggestions of grinding want that sadden and discourage; if, instead of expecting poverty, and all that the idea implies, they could go through one year expecting just the opposite,--prosperity,--visualizing, talking prosperity, thinking prosperity, acting as though they expected to be, as though they were, prosperous! Just this radical change of thought, this transposition of mental att.i.tude, the persistent holding of the prosperous viewpoint for a year would not only change their whole outlook on life, but would revolutionize their material conditions.

They would brush up and clean up the things they have; their ambition would grow; their new way of looking at life would give an upward tendency to their surroundings. No matter how poor, their squalid aspect would go. Everything would take on a different appearance. There would be a new light in the people's faces. There would be hope there instead of despair,--expectancy of better things would give a glow of cheerfulness to their countenances. There would be a light in their eyes which never was there before. Working in the spirit of hope and expectancy of better things instead of that of discouragement and the fears of even greater poverty, they would forge ahead in a way that would astonish themselves.

The time is not far away when we shall have prosperity pract.i.tioners who will make a specialty of teaching people how to free their minds from thoughts that produce poverty by replacing them with their opposites, thus constantly enlarging the mental power of attraction until the mind becomes a powerful magnet, ever attracting prosperity.

These specialists will teach people the creative power of right thinking, and will show them how to attract their desires instead of killing them, as so many do, by wrong thinking. Clergymen of the future will do much toward eliminating poverty from among their people by instructing them to turn their backs on it and to face toward prosperity. They will teach them how to draw to themselves the sunlight of prosperity.

The cure of physical disease is effected by arousing the curative, restorative forces within the individual. These are brought into operation largely through faith in the physician, in the remedy, in the healer. The healthful mental att.i.tude thus created overcomes the disease.

The cure of poverty,--poverty is usually a mental disease,--is effected in a similar way. The sufferer must first of all have faith in the great Physician of the universe. When that is fully and firmly established there will be no difficulty in flooding his mind with the prosperity thought, the thought that our Father-Mother-G.o.d is the Author of abundance, the Author of all the wealth of the earth, and that He is infinitely kinder and more solicitous for our welfare than the fondest mother could be for her child.

We have not yet tapped the possibilities of any part of the world's resources. Every inhabitant of the earth to-day is treading on secrets which would emanc.i.p.ate man from drudgery and allow him to live happily instead of merely to eke out a wretched subsistence as he has done up to the present. Hitherto, in the great majority of cases, we have barely been existing on the husks of things. Now we are beginning to taste the kernel, because we are coming into a knowledge of the powers locked up within ourselves, and also of the illimitable supply of G.o.d's abundance.

Here and there, people are mastering the law of opulence. They are demonstrating that they can conquer poverty by making themselves prosperity magnets; that is, by thinking and working in conformity with the law of opulence, of abundance.

It is monstrous that so many of G.o.d's children are starving right on the sh.o.r.es past which the stream of inexhaustible plenty flows, a stream laden with all the rich things of the universe. There is no excuse for the horrible misery and suffering that exist in our midst. There is no reason why the children of the King of kings should be hara.s.sed and tortured, driven into premature graves by poverty, for the Creator has produced enough to make every one of His children rich, to give them an abundance of all they need. There is no necessity for those who have inherited all the good things of the earth to remain poor.

The very structure of the human machine indicates that it was intended for the best, that it was planned for comforts, for luxuries, and not for poverty-stricken conditions. If we could only realize the far-reaching influence of always expecting the best to come to us, always expecting opulence, success, we would never allow ourselves to be dominated by the black pictures of poverty and failure. If every one who is suffering from the limitations and humiliations imposed by a grinding poverty would proceed to establish the prosperity habit along the lines suggested; if they would, by continually holding the prosperous thought, convince the sub-conscious self that we were made to be successful, that prosperity belongs to us we should soon sight the millennium.

When we affirm our divinity, and claim our heritage; when we realize that our birthright keeps us in touch with the very Source of all supply, when we know that it was never intended that G.o.d's children should be poor or go hungry, that it was never intended they should live in poverty-stricken conditions, then we shall have struck the very basic principle of prosperity.

Hold the victorious att.i.tude toward life and you will overcome all unfavorable conditions.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SUGGESTION OF INFERIORITY

As the initials which boys cut in the bark of a sapling become great, ugly scars on the grown tree, so the suggestions of inferiority etched upon the young mind become great ugly scars in the life of the adult.

You may succeed when others do not believe in you, when everybody else denounces you even, but never when you do not believe in yourself.

In olden times criminals, fugitives from justice, and slaves were branded. The words, "I am a fugitive," "I am a thief," or others indicating their crime or their inferior status were seared on some part of the body with a red hot iron.

In Rome robbers were branded on the forehead with a degrading letter.

Laborers in mines, convicts, and gladiators were also branded. In Greece slaves were sometimes branded with a favorite poetical pa.s.sage of their master. In France the branding iron used on slaves and criminals often took the form of the fleur-de-lis. In England deserters from the army were marked with the letter D, and vagabonds, robbers and brawlers were branded in some way to advertise their disgrace.

The barbarous custom of branding human beings with the badge of crime or inferiority persisted in America even after it had been discontinued in the mother country. Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" gives us a vivid picture of the suffering inflicted on the moral delinquent by Puritan moralists in Colonial days. The tragic heroine, Hester Prynn, is never allowed to forget her sin. The sinister scarlet letter with which she is branded proclaims her shame to every one she meets. While long after the Colonial period, up to the time of their emanc.i.p.ation, slaves were branded in Christian America with the initials of their owners as they were in Pagan Greece and Rome.

The mere idea of this stamping human beings with an indelible badge of disgrace, of inferiority, shocks us moderns. Yet we do not hesitate to mark people to-day with the scarlet letter of outlawry, the brand of ostracism. We put the criminal badge on our prisoners by shaving their heads and clothing them in stripes, thus perpetually keeping before them the suggestion that they are criminals, outlaws, apart from their kind.

We even carry our branding into our homes. In order to satisfy our cheap vanity, we force our domestic workers to wear as a mark of inferiority, a distinctive livery to remind them that they are menials, a lower grade of being than ourselves. As a matter of fact, if it were not for these branding distinctions, the maid would, in many instances, be taken for the mistress and the valet for the master whom they far outrank both in appearance and character.

There are certain inalienable rights which human beings inherit from their Maker, rights which no fellow being, no human law or authority is justified in taking away. No matter what offense a person may commit against society we have no right to degrade him below the level of a human being; we have no right so to bombard him with the suggestion of degradation, of inferiority, that we are almost certain to make him less a man; to lower his estimate of himself to such a degree that we rob him of the power even to attempt to regain his self-respect and his position in society. We have no right to insist that those who work for us shall wear a badge of inferiority. We have no right to thrust the suggestion of inferiority perpetually into the mind of any human being.

One of the greatest injuries we can inflict on any one is to convince him that he is a n.o.body, that he has no possibilities, and will never amount to anything. The suggestion of inferiority is responsible for more blighted ambitions, more stunted lives, more failures, more misery and unhappiness than almost any other single cause. Just as the constant dripping of water will wear away stone, so the constant iteration of a statement will cause its acceptance by the average person. Even though the facts may be opposed to it, a constant suggestion presented to the mind impresses us in spite of ourselves and tends to a conviction of its truth.

When the weight of the Civil War was nearly crushing Lincoln, when it was the fashion to denounce and criticise and condemn him, when he was being caricatured as a hideous monster in the jingo press all over the world, one day, walking the floor in the White House, he was overheard saying to himself, "Abe Lincoln, are you a dog or are you a man?" During these dark days it would appear that Lincoln sometimes had a doubt as to whether he was really the man his closest friends knew him to be, or the one an antagonistic press pictured him.

The curse of the inferiority suggestion not only tends to destroy our faith in ourselves, but it often makes even the innocent take on the appearance of guilt. When Lieutenant Dreyfus, through a foul conspiracy, was convicted of the crime of treason against France, he showed outwardly all the manifestations of guilt. When stripped, in the presence of a vast mult.i.tude, in a public square in Paris, of all his insignia of rank as an officer in the army of France, the epaulettes and b.u.t.tons being cut from his uniform and his sword broken, although conscious of his innocence of the crime imputed to him he actually looked like the guilty thing he was accused of being. And all but a very few close friends in the vast concourse that witnessed his public disgrace believed that even his appearance corroborated his guilt. The brain of the unfortunate Dreyfus was a wireless receiving station for the hatred, the contempt of millions of people who believed they were looking at a vile traitor who had sold valuable military secrets to Germany.

We are all influenced for good or ill by suggestion, but children and young people are peculiarly susceptible to it. The constant suggestion of stupidity, badness, and dullness by teachers or parents, filling a child's mind with the idea that he is a blockhead, always blundering, making mistakes, that he is no good, and never will amount to anything, makes an indelible impression on his plastic mind.

The child naturally looks up to its parents and teachers and accepts what they say as truth. He has implicit faith in their superior knowledge and experience, which seem wonderful to him, and when they tell him he is stupid, dull, slow, or bad, he takes what they say for granted. He makes up his mind that, since they say so, he must be a blockhead, and that they are right in thinking he is no good and will never amount to anything.

It is criminal for a parent or teacher to brand a child as dull, stupid, bad; to tell him that there is nothing in him and that he will never be anybody or amount to anything in life. The effect on a sensitive child is disastrous. Thousands of boys and girls have been stunted mentally, their careers handicapped, and in some instances completely ruined by such cruel suggestions of inferiority.