may most shine.” If this thought is sincere, it carries immense power. It will always be drawing more power to you, because every additional person’s good-will you so draw and fasten to you is an additional unseen rill of life feeding yours. It is a rill of substance, though unseen,—as real as the elements we do see. Good-will of others is constructive thought. It helps build us up. It is good for your body. It makes your blood purer, your muscles stronger, and your whole form more symmetrical in shape. It is the real “elixir of life.” The more of such thought you attract to you, the more life will you have. You draw, then, the best elements from all with whom you associate. If you send out a contrary order of thought, you draw to you from them the poisonous and destructive elements. These will hurt your body. Persons in this way are literally hated to death. The ill-will of many people fixed on one man can injure that man’s health. It has killed many. It can injure no one, if they oppose it with the thought of good-will, and the desire to do justice, which must always go with good-will. Nothing else can successfully oppose it. If you persist in the thought of good intent to all, you are connecting yourself with the higher and more powerful order of thought-element. You are then receiving of that thought from minds, and from a world of greater power than you can now realize of here. You are connecting yourself with a world which does nothing but build up, whose inhabitants are gods in power, and whose creations at will are beyond our wildest dreams. All that so-called fable or fancy has conceived of are realities in the higher worlds of mind. When, by the thought of good intent to all, you so connect yourself with that world, you are receiving of their powerful thought. You are then absolutely safe against all enemies.
This is no myth of sentiment. It belongs to the same system of law whereby the sun gives heat, the winds blow, the tides move, the seed grows. In whatever mood you set your mind, does your spirit receive of unseen substance in correspondence with that mood. It is as much a chemical law as a spiritual law. Chemistry is not confined to the elements we see. The elements we do not see with the physical eye outnumber ten thousand times those we do see. The Christ injunction, “Do good to those who hate you,” is based on a scientific fact and a natural law. So to do good, is to bring to yourself all the elements in nature of power and good. To do evil, is to bring the contrary destructive elements. When our eyes are opened, self-preservation will make us stop all evil thought. Those who live by hate will die by hate; that is, “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Every evil thought is as a sword drawn on the person to whom it is directed. If a sword is drawn in return, so much the worse for both.
Christ controlled the elements by the power of his own thought, and his connection with the higher and powerful world of thought. Thought being substance, can, when very powerful, be so concentrated as to be made visible in physical forms. It was Christ’s thought, and the power so exercised, that caused the so-called miracle of the loaves and fishes, and all the others.
Once, on a woman’s touching the hem of Christ’s garment to be healed, he said, “Who hath touched me? Virtue hath gone out of me.” This was a woman full of evil thought. Christ felt immediately the contamination of her thought. It was to him as poison. Mingling with his own, it for the moment corrupted it. It lessened for the moment his power to control the elements. By virtue going from him, he meant power going from him.
Christ’s spirit was so pure and sensitive as to feel immediately the contact with any evil order of thought.
Your power to feel people’s natures is always proportionate to your freedom from any evil thought. Purity means power. Steel is at once the purity of iron, and the power of iron. Highly refined spirit comes of the purest thought, and is the most powerful thought. Christ felt the woman’s evil nature and its effects. But, knowing the laws, he shook off the evil by his more powerful thought of good-will to her. So he could have done had he been compelled to remain long in association with her. He would not have so remained save for some special purpose; because the resisting power he would have been obliged to put out to throw off the evil results of her thought, might have been expended with far more profit in other directions. If your thought is the superior, there may be many persons to whom you can do only a certain amount of good through association. They can only receive a small amount of your thought. They give back in return, and you absorb a large amount of their inferior thought. It is as if you gave them gold, and got back iron. You may from them get more iron than is good for you. You give them a great deal of gold they cannot absorb. In this way, both of you are injured.
You will therefore associate most where your thought is most appreciated and also used. Then both of you are benefited mentally and physically. You are not “unequally yoked together.”
If your superior thought merely entertains people, and they get no good from it save a pleasure for the moment, you may be of use to them and so are they to you. But the use is relatively small. They may value you most as an entertainment, and but little as a use. If they improve very slowly through the thought absorbed from you, you cannot afford much close association with them. They are your distant spiritual relations. If they improve rapidly through your association, if they take the truth you give, and try to act and live up to it, you can longer remain near them. They are your near spiritual relations.
If they improve very rapidly, they make with such improvement a certain life or quality of thought peculiarly their own. This will be absorbed as a nourishment and strength for you. You are then giving and receiving to advantage.
If yours is the superior thought, there may come seasons when some time is needed by the other to assimilate what you have given. There may then be certain periods of separation.
Both of you, on again coming together, will be the better and stronger for such separation. You then come together to give to each other of new elements of thought gathered elsewhere. There are no eternal separations for those who are building-up their spirits of similar elements of thought. They grow ever closer and closer together. They build into each other’s hearts. They are always enriching each other. They separate with the assured certainty of meeting again. They will meet only to find more and more in each other. They find that the law which at first they thought so hard, harsh, and cruel, is only a source and means for permanent peace and happiness.
X.
THE SLAVERY OF FEAR.
Thoughts are Things.
The most common, yet most unknown, form of slavery is that where you are ruled by the thought about you. You may be in the employ of another person. You do your best to earn your money. You are conscientious, and desire to earn your wages. Yet you are troubled by a continual fear, that you do not give full satisfaction, or that you may be discharged. You live in continual fear of coming to want, if so discharged, or of being obliged to continue this mere struggle for the body’s existence under still harder conditions.
The reason for these unpleasant thoughts is, that some other mind is acting on your own. Some one is hostile to you. You feel that hostile thought. It is not on your part a “notion.” There are many persons to-day, living under control of undecided minds, and dependent on them, as they think, for a livelihood. They may give that undecided mind much of their own inspiration, plan device, invention, and fertility of thought. They may give this unconsciously. Because, it is worth repeating many times, “Thought is substance, and is absorbed by one mind from another.”
The person so ruled may have the superior mind. Such a person may be indispensable to the fickle, and possibly unjust and tyrannical employer. If taken away, that employer would feel that a prop had been removed. Yet that superior mind may go on, year after year, in slavery; giving to the other idea, and seeing it but half carried out, or imperfectly carried out.
No shackles are so heavy as these. They fetter the spirit. In such position you are not
