settle down into the conviction that these things do not belong to them, but are for those in a very different class.
But why are you in a different class? Simply because you think yourself into another class; think yourself into inferiority; because you place limits for yourself. You put up bars between yourself and plenty. You cut off abundance, make the law of supply inoperative for you, by shutting your mind to it.
And by what law can you expect to get what you believe you cannot get? By what philosophy can you obtain the good things of the world when you are thoroughly convinced that they are not for you?
The limitation is in ourselves, and not in the Creator. He wants His children to have all of the good things of the universe, because He has fashioned them for His own. If we do not take them, it is because we limit ourselves.
One of the greatest curses of the world is the belief in the necessity of poverty.
Most people have a strong conviction that some must necessarily be poor; that they were made to be poor. But there was no poverty, no want, no lack, in the Creator’s plan for man. There need not be a poor person on the planet. The earth is full of resources which we have scarcely yet touched. We have been poor in the very midst of abundance, simply because of our own blighting, limiting thought.
We are discovering that thoughts are things, that they are incorporated into the life and form part of the character, and that if we harbor the fear thought, the lack thought, if we are afraid of poverty, of coming to want, this poverty thought, fear thought incorporates itself in the very life texture and makes us the magnet to attract more poverty like itself.
It was not intended that we should have such a hard time getting a living, that we should just manage to squeeze along, to get together a few comforts, to spend about all of our time making a living instead of making a life. The life abundant, full, free, beautiful, was intended for us.
If we were absolutely normal, our living-getting would be a mere incident to our life-making. The great ambition of the race would be to develop a superb type of manhood, a beautiful, magnificent womanhood; man making, man building, instead of dollar making, as now.
Resolve that you will turn your back on the poverty idea, and that you will vigorously expect prosperity; that you will hold tenaciously the thought of abundance, the opulent ideal, which is befitting your nature; that you will try to live in the realization of plenty, to actually feel rich, opulent. This will help you to attain what you long for. There is a creative force in intense desire.
The fact is, we live in our own worlds, we are creations of our own thought. Each builds his own world by his thought habit. He can surround himself with an atmosphere of abundance, or of lack; of plenty, or of want.
God’s children were not made to grovel but to aspire; to look up, not down. They were not made to pinch along in poverty, but for larger, grander things. Nothing is too good for the children of the Prince of Peace; nothing too beautiful for human beings; nothing too grand, too sublime, too magnificent for us to enjoy.
Why should we not expect great, grand things, if we are made in God’s image and are His children? We are heirs of all that is His, all that is beautiful and opulent in the universe. The very holding of the mind open toward all the good things of the world, expecting and appreciating them, will have everything to do with obtaining them.
There is something wrong when multitudes of the sons and daughters of the King of Kings, who have inherited all the good things of the universe, starve on the very shores of the stream of plenty, of opulence unspeakable, which flows past their very doors and which carries infinite supply.
Our circumstances in life, our financial condition, our poverty or our wealth, our friends or lack of them, our condition of harmony or discord, are all very largely the offspring of our thought. If our mental attitude has been one of want, if we have dwelt much upon lack, our environment will correspond. If our thinking has been open, generous, and broad, if we have thought in terms of abundance, prosperity, and have made a relative effort to realize these conditions, our environment will tend to correspond. Everything we get in life comes through the gateway of our thought and resembles its quality. If that is pinched, stingy, mean, what flows to us will be like it.
When we see people who have been for years in a poverty-stricken condition, unless there has been much ill health or very unusual misfortune, we know that somebody has been sinning, has been in a wrong, vicious, mental attitude. We should very likely find the head of the house a complainer against fate for the sparseness of his supply, the littleness of his inflow.
If you are dissatisfied with your condition, if you feel that life has been hard and the fates cruel, if you are a complainer of your lot, you will probably find that, whatever your condition may be, in your home or business or social life, it is the legitimate offspring of your own thought, your own ideals, and that you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Right thinking will produce right living; clean thinking, a clean life; and a prosperous, generous thought followed up by intelligent endeavor to make your thoughts and your ideals real will produce corresponding results.
If we learn to trust implicitly the Great Dispenser of All Good, the source of Infinite Supply,—the Power which brings seed time and harvest, the Power which feeds, which supplies, the Power which bids us take no thought for the morrow but consider the lilies how they grow,—and do our level best to improve our condition, we shall never know what want is.
There is nothing which the human race lacks so much as unquestioned, implicit confidence in the divine source of all supply. We ought to stand in the same relation to the Infinite Source as the child does to its parents. The child does not say, “I do not dare eat this food for fear that I may not get any more.” It takes everything with absolute confidence and assurance that all its needs will be supplied, that there is plenty more where these things came from.
We do not have half good enough opinions of our possibilities; do not expect half enough of ourselves; we do not demand half enough, hence the meagerness, the stinginess of what we actually get. We do not demand the abundance which belongs to us, hence the leanness, the lack of fullness, the incompleteness of our lives. We do not demand royally enough. We are content with too little of the things worthwhile. It was intended that we should live the abundant life, that we should have plenty of everything that is good for us. No one was meant to live in poverty and wretchedness. The lack of anything that is desirable is not natural to the constitution of any human being.
Hold the thought that you are one with what you want, that you are in tune with it, so as to attract it; keep your mind vigorously concentrated upon it; never doubt your ability to get what you are after, and you will tend to get it.
Poverty is often a mental disease. If you are suffering from it, if you are a victim of it, you will be surprised to see how quickly your condition will improve when you change your mental attitude, and, instead of holding that miserable, shriveled, limited poverty image, turn about and face towards abundance and plenty, towards freedom and happiness.
Success comes through a perfectly scientific mental process. The man who becomes prosperous believes that he is going to be prosperous. He has faith in his ability to make money. He does not start out with his mind filled with doubts and fears, and all the time talk poverty and think poverty, walk like a pauper and dress like a pauper. He turns his face towards the thing he is trying for and is determined to get, and will not admit its opposite picture in his mind.
There are multitudes of poor people in the world who are half satisfied to remain in poverty, and who have ceased to make a desperate struggle to rise out of it. They may work hard,
