THE MIRACLES OF RIGHT THOUGHT. Orison Swett Marden

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

       Table of Contents

      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 of dignity and independence, where he will not be liable at any moment to be a burden to his friends in case of sickness or other emergencies, or where those depending on him may suffer.

      It is the poverty attitude, the narrowness of our thought that has limited us. If we had larger and grander conceptions of life, of our birthright; if, instead of whining, crawling, grumbling, sneaking and apologizing, we were to stand erect and claim our kingship, demand our rich inheritance, the inheritance which is an abundance of all that is good and beautiful and true, we should live far completer, fuller lives. We should not be so poverty-stricken but for the narrowness of our faith, the meanness of our conception of our birthright. There are plenty of evidences in man’s construction and environment that he was made for infinitely grander and superber things than even the most fortunate of men now possess and enjoy.

      Almost every wealthy man in this country will tell you that his greatest satisfaction and happiest days were when he was emerging from poverty into a competency; when he first felt the tonic from the swelling of his small savings towards the stream of fortune, and knew that want would no longer dog his steps. It was then he began to see ahead of him leisure, self-development, self-culture, or perhaps study and travel, and to feel that those whom he loved would be lifted from the clutches of poverty. Comforts were taking the place of stern necessities and blunting drudgery, and he realized that he had the power to lift himself above himself, that henceforth he would be of consequence in the world; that he might have pictures and music and books, luxuries for his home, and that his children might not have to struggle quite as hard for an education as he had. Then he first felt the power to give them and others a little start in the world; felt the tonic of growth, the little circle about him expanding into a larger sphere, broadening into a wider horizon.

      There are plenty of evidences that we were made for grand things, sublime things; for abundance and not for poverty. Lack and want do not fit man’s divine nature. The trouble with us is that we do not have half enough faith in the good that is in store for us. We do not dare fling out our whole soul’s desire, to follow the leading of our divine hunger and ask without stint for the abundance that is our birthright. We ask little things, and we expect little things, pinching our desires and limiting our supply. Not daring to ask to the full of our soul’s desire, we do not open our minds sufficiently to allow a great inflow of good things. Our mentality is so restricted, our self-expression so repressed, that we think in terms of stinginess and limitation. We do not fling out our soul’s desire with that abundant faith which trusts implicitly, and which