that will finally match your vision with its reality; that will make your dream come true.
Take a little time before retiring at night and get by yourself. Sit quietly and think and dream to your heart’s content. Do not be afraid of your vision, or of your power to dream, for “without a vision the people perish.” The faculty to dream was not given to mock you. There is a reality back of it. It is a divine gift intended to give you a glimpse of the grand things in store for you and to lift you out of the common into the uncommon; out of hampering, iron conditions into ideal ones, and to show you that these things can become realities in your life.
These glimpses into paradise are intended to keep us from getting discouraged by our failures and disappointments.
I do not mean fanciful, ephemeral pipe dreaming, but real, legitimate desire and the sacred longings of the soul, which are given us as constant reminders that we can make our lives sublime; that no matter how disagreeable or unfriendly our surroundings may be, we can lift ourselves into the ideal conditions which we see in our vision.
There is a divinity behind our legitimate desires.
By the desires that have divinity in them, I do not refer to the things that we want but do not need; I do not refer to the desires that turn to dead-sea fruit on our lips or to ashes when eaten, but to the legitimate desires of the soul for the realization of those ideals, the longing for full, complete self- expression, for the time and opportunity for the weaving of the pattern shown us in the moment of our highest transfiguration.
“A man will remain a rag picker as long as he has only a rag picker’s vision.”
Our mental attitude, our heart’s desire, is our perpetual prayer which Nature answers. She takes it for granted that we desire what our heart asks for—that what we want we are headed toward, and she helps us to it. People little realize that their desires are their perpetual prayers—not head prayers, but heart prayers—and that they are granted.
We are all conscious that there accompanies us through life a divine messenger, given to protect and direct us; a messenger who will answer all our interrogations. No one is mocked with the yearning for that which they have no ability to attain. If he or she holds the right mental attitude and struggles earnestly, honestly toward their goal, they will reach it, or at least approximate to it.
There is a tremendous creative, producing power in the perpetual focusing of the mind along the line of the desire, the ambition. It develops a marvelous power to attract, to create the thing we long for.
“The thing we long for, that we are for one transcendent moment.”
Our heart yearnings inspire our creative energies to do the things we long for. They are a constant tonic to our faculties and increase our ability, tending to make our dreams come true. Nature is a great one-price storekeeper who hands us out what we ask for if we pay the price. Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions,
The bird does not have an instinct to fly South in winter without a real South to match it; nor has the Creator given to us these heart yearnings, soul longings for a larger, completer life, for an opportunity for a full expression of our possibilities, nor the longing for immortality, without a reality to match them.
Everything in the vegetable world, our flowers, our fruits, come to their natural, flowering, fruitage and ripeness at the appointed time; the winter does not surprise the buds before they have had an opportunity to open up; the fruit is ready to drop off the trees before the snow comes; the growth is not stunted.
But if we should find when the winter came that all our fruit was still green, that the flowers were still in bud, and that instead of having developed they were cut off by the cold, we would realize that there was something at fault somewhere. And when we find that not one out of the hundreds of millions of human beings ever ripens into completeness, is never even half developed before cut off by death, we know here also something is wrong.
The windfalls which we see on every hand under the life tree are not normal. There is something wrong when men and women inheriting God-like qualities and capable of infinite possibilities fall off the life tree before they are half matured.
We feel the same protest that the windfall apple feels against having its life blighted and cut off before it has had time to ripen, to develop its possibilities—the same protest that the stalwart oak, still sleeping in possibility in the acorn which is just beginning to sprout, feels when it is ruthlessly torn from the soil.
Even the men most richly endowed with ability, education, and opportunity, even the giants of the race, after the completest life possible, feel, as they stand on the edge of the grave, that they are but human acorns with all their possibilities still in them, just beginning to sprout.
But it will not always be thus. All analogy teaches that human life will eventually have an opportunity for its complete blossoming, full fruitage, untrammeled self-expression. There will, if we follow our vision, be a time and an opportunity for the blossoming of our desires, the fulfillment of our ambition, the ripening of our ideals, for they are the petals in the closed bud which will find an opportunity, sometime, somewhere, to open up and fling out their fragrance and beauty without blight or bruise to strangle growth.
Our instinctive yearning for the time and opportunity for the complete, untrammeled unfoldment of our powers; our sense of the unfairness, the unfitness of being cut off before we have had half enough time in which to mature, to ripen—all these are greater evidences that there are realities to match these heart longings and soul yearnings that have ever been printed in any book.
We are beginning to see that there is material in every normal being to make the ideal perfect man, the perfect woman. If we could only mentally hold the perfect pattern, the perfect ideal persistently, so that it would become the dominant mental attitude, it would soon be woven into the life and we should become perfect human beings.
The divine injunction to be perfect, even as He is perfect, was not given man to mock him. The possibility of our waking in His likeness is literally true.
Chapter II.
Success and Happiness are for You
If a man thinks sickness, poverty, and misfortune, he will meet them and claim them all eventually as his own. But he will not acknowledge the close relationship—he will deny his own children and declare they were sent to him by an evil fate.
Poverty is the hell of which most modem Englishmen are most afraid. —Carlyle.
Poverty is the open-mouthed hell which yawns beneath civilization. —Henry George.
Wealth is created mentally first.
The stream of plenty will not flow toward the stingy, parsimonious, doubting thought.
Holding the poverty thought keeps one in touch with poverty producing conditions.
No man has a right, unless he cannot help himself, to remain where he will be constantly subjected to the cramping, ambition blighting influences and great temptations of poverty. His self-respect demands that he should get out of such an environment. It is his duty to put himself in a position
