Commence by seeing yourself in mind as brave. See yourself, in what you call imagination, as calmly defying whatever you fear, be it a man or a woman, be it a debt or a dreaded possibility. What so you figure to yourself in mind is a reality. Such thinking will give you strength. Demand for yourself more courage. Ask for it. Pray for it, and the quality of courage will come to you more and more, and what so comes can never be lost.
XI.
WHAT ARE SPIRITUAL GIFTS?
Thoughts are Things.
There is one spirit, one power, one force, in the universe, but its different manifestations or channels of operation are countless. It moves the breeze, the ocean, the avalanche, and the earth in its orbit. It moves the seed to grow, the plant to blossom, the flower to color itself with inimitable hues. It colors the bird’s plumage, and gives power to its wing. It works in the instinct, or lower reason, of the animal. Its highest known expression is in man, because in man there is concentrated the most of this force. In other and unseen orders of being, it is concentrated as to volume, and power, and varieties of power, as far above man, as man is above the mole.
It is a spiritual gift, which when matters look dark and squally, when debts are pressing, and friends seem to fall away, and business falls away also, that keeps your mind in a mood quite as buoyant and cheerful as when success shines on you; and when you have this gift, or, in other words, have grown to the power to hold continually such mood, you command success, and must have it; because then the silent force of your mind is felt by other determined minds, be your body sleeping or waking, and keeps them interested in you, and working in some way in your behalf. When so you hold the mood of confidence and determination, you are connected spiritually, or by unseen element, with all other confident, determined, and pushing minds. You become a part of such mind, giving to it of your own force, and receiving their force in return, and you are then, with them, moving forward to success.
Shrewdness in business is a spiritual gift or power. It involves a certain business prophetic faculty which knows when to buy, how to buy, and when to sell. It involves knowledge of human nature,—of knowing, or rather feeling, honesty and dishonesty almost at a glance. You have a sense which feels the thought of others, and gives you notice by such feeling whether their thought be good or bad, as by your sense of physical touch, you know the difference between a rough and smooth surface. That is a spiritual power in business which learns to economize time and strength, and thereby accomplish as much in an hour as others may in a day. Any great business success is gained by the exercise of a spiritual power. Spiritual power is used for all purposes, and is the only power used. It can be used on a high or low plane of motive.
Spirituality is not living in dreams, or living in the clouds, or having a pale face and languid air, as if the things of this earth were beneath one’s serious consideration, and were rather endured than enjoyed. Spirituality means the greatest acuteness of intellect, the greatest foresight, the greatest amount of spirit or power gathered in a person, and the wisest expenditure of that power. It means the greatest governmental ability, be that ability exercised in the small empire of a household, or the larger empire of a nation. Spiritual gifts mean all talents, all powers, and all methods of using those powers.
That is a spiritual gift which finds out healing properties in plants, roots, and herbs. All nature expressed in substance, seen of the physical eye, is an expression also of mind or force; and every plant has its peculiar kind or quality of that force, and this, when applied, can help the individual spirit to drive out disease. But all seen things are expressions of the lower or relatively cruder form of mind or spirit, and therefore have a limited power; and, when any material remedy is applied, the main dependence should not be on that remedy, but on the power of mind, and, above all things, one’s own mind or force, to put the body above the reach of disease. I apply clothing to my body, as an external application of wool or cotton to protect that body from cold. But I believe in the power of mind to resist cold, and be comfortable, with much less clothing than the average wear. Your spirit can by degrees attain such power. That is no reason why I should lessen the amount of clothing in cold weather, before I have grown to or gathered that amount of force which shall so resist cold. If I think a medicine will aid what force I have to cure the body, or, in other words, to add its peculiar spiritual strength to my own spiritual strength, to act on the body, I think it better to take it. But for that reason, I should not fly to a pill or a stimulant at the first sign of pain or weakness, but turn on first my spiritual or mental force, and in any case rely first and last on that. The gift of thought healing is a spiritual gift. It belongs to all in proportion as their permanent flow of thought is pure, cheerful, determined, vigorous, decided, and abounding in good-will to others. That order of thought sent a sick person is a real element or force, and has power to give that person strength. If you give strength from so healthy a source as healthy thought, you drive out disease, or lack of ease to the body. Your own healthy thought aided by the healthy thought of others, is real substance, and has the power to build up any organ which is sore or inflamed, and wasting away through lack of some element necessary to it.
All pain is owing to an absence of life element in the part affected. The power is then lacking to send the blood through that part. Blood then collects and stagnates there. This you call inflammation. The blood is not the real life of the body, but only the conductor of its real unseen life, or spirit; and, when that is wanting, the conductor or messenger of this life has no power to travel. It collects in some one place, and the effort of the spirit to drive it from that place is too much force concentrated in that one place, or organ, which causes lack of ease, or pain; and lack of ease, or pain, implies that the unseen force or spirit is no longer equally distributed throughout the body, but is acting in excess on some one part of it, in which case every other organ or part feels the lack of this force, and is consequently weak.
Healthy thought can revive and put strength in sick bodies; and that is the reason that you, if sick, feel so much better from the visit of a cheerful, hopeful, vigorous person. Such a person gives, and you from him or her receive and absorb in thought, element life: and if people and friends about sick-beds, and in the houses of the sick, would at least try to make their thought hopeful, strong, cheerful; if they would keep-in mind that the spirit of the sick person was as strong as ever, and that the throes of pain came only through the spirit’s effort to regain complete possession of its instrument, the body,—they would, in sending out hopeful, encouraging thought to that spirit, send it real strengthening element, and help it very much to make the body well again. They would then be using their spiritual power to aid another spirit in trying to repair a damaged body. If, instead of this, everyone about the sick-bed is sad, dejected, and despondent, they send the struggling spirit despondent thought, or order of force, and make its work all the heavier. They are using their combined spiritual power to make the struggle of the spirit all the harder. Then if ten, or twenty, or a thousand, or an hundred thousand friends of the sick person outside, far and near, are also despondent and hopeless as to that person’s condition, because some one has said there is no hope and the malady is incurable, they help to swell the volume of despondent thought acting on that patient’s spirit. They work their spiritual power in the wrong direction, and that power is always the greater for good or ill, for the life or the death, of that person’s body, in proportion to the number of minds sending their force or thought to the patient.
The gift of healing can and should be used cooperatively; and if, when the body of any strong and useful spirit is overcome by disease, all minds would direct on that person a current of hopeful, invigorating thought,—thought full of expectancy of life instead of expectancy of death, and desire also that when the spirit again controlled its body, that it might learn the cause of its disease, and so be on guard against any repetition of it,—there would then soon be longer useful lives, and vigor of mind and body prolonged to periods the world at present does not dream of.
That
