How To Get What You Want

You are victory organized; you were born to conquer, to play a magnificent part in life’s great game. But you can never do anything great or grand until you have such a conviction of yourself and your ability.

We establish relations with our desires, with whatever is dominant in our minds, with the things we long for with all our hearts, and we tend to realize these things in proportion to the persistency and intensity of our longings and our intelligent efforts to realize them.

Stop thinking trouble if you want to attract its opposite; stop thinking poverty if you wish to attract plenty. Refuse to have anything to do with the things you fear, the things you do not want.

A piece of magnetized steel will attract only the products of iron ore. It has no affinity for wood, copper, rubber, or any other substance that has not iron in it. When you were a boy you found that your little steel magnet would pick up a needle but not a match or a toothpick. It would draw to itself only that like itself.

Men and women are human magnets. Just as a steel magnet drawn through a pile of rubbish will pull out only the things which have an affinity for it, so we are constantly drawing to us, establishing relations with, the things and the people that respond to our thoughts and ideals. Our environment, our associates, our general condition are the result of our mental attraction. These things have come to us on the physical plane because we have concentrated upon them, have related ourselves to them mentally; they are our affinities, and will remain with us as long as the affinity for them continues to exist in our minds.

Your thoughts, your viewpoints, your conception of what your status and position in life will be, your ideal of your future, will draw you exactly to that plane like a lodestone. Focus your mind, your predictions, your expectations on poverty, failure and wretchedness; banish ambition, hope, expectation of good things, and give full sway in your mentality to fear, worry, doubt, anticipation of evil, and the ego magnet will draw you unerringly to squalid surroundings, to an inferior position, to association with persons of a lower order of mind on a meaner social plane.

The great trouble with all of us who are struggling with unhappy or unfortunate conditions is, that we have separated ourselves in some way from the great magnetic center of creation. We are not thinking right, and so we are not attracting the right things. “Think the things you want.” The profoundest philosophy is locked up in these few words. Think of them clearly, persistently, concentrating upon them with all the force and might of your mind, and struggle toward them with all your energy. This is the way to make yourself a magnet for the things you want. But the moment you begin to doubt, to worry, to fear, you demagnetize yourself, and the things you desire flee from you. You drive them away by your mental attitude. They cannot come near you while you are deliberately separating yourself from them. You are going in one direction, and the things you want are going in the opposite direction.

“A desire in the heart for anything,” says H. Emilie Cady, “is God’s sure promise sent beforehand to indicate that it is yours already in the limitless realm of supply.”

No matter how discouraging your present outlook, how apparently unpromising your future, cling to your desire and you will realize it. Picture the ideal conditions, visualize the success, which you long to attain; imagine yourself already in the position you are ambitious to reach. Do not acknowledge limitations, do not allow any other suggestion to lodge in your mind than the success you long for, the conditions you aspire to. Picture your desires as actually realized, and hold fast to your vision with all the tenacity you can muster. This is the way out of your difficulties; this is the way to open the door ahead of you to the place higher up, to better and brighter conditions.

When Clifton Crawford, the actor, started on his career in America, he played in one-week performances in small towns and cities. One night he was told by a prominent member of the company that his work wasn’t much good, that he would never be successful, and had better go back home to Scotland. Notwithstanding this discouraging but well-meant criticism and advice, young Crawford remained in America, continued in his profession and in a comparatively short time reached the coveted position of a Broadway “star.” After his first success in New York he had the satisfaction of meeting the friend who had advised him to return to his own country, and reminded him of the incident.

Clifton Crawford won out because he related himself mentally to the thing he wanted, because he listened to the voice in his own soul rather than to the pessimistic predictions of outside voices.

Why has the heart restless yearnings For heights and steps untrod? Some call it the voice of longing And others the voice of God.

That something within you which longs to be brought out, to be expressed, is the voice of God calling to you. Don’t disregard it. Don’t be afraid of your longings; there is divinity in them. Don’t try to strangle them because you think they are much too extravagant, too Utopian. The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.

One reason why the lives of many of us are so narrow and pinched, small and common-place, is because we are afraid to fling out our desires, our longings, afraid to visualize them. We become so accustomed to putting our confidence only in things that we see on the physical plane, in the material that is real to the senses, that it is very difficult for us to realize that the capital power, the force that does things, resides in the mind. Instead of believing in our possession of the things we desire, we believe in our limitations, in our restrictions. We demagnetize ourselves by wrong thinking and lack of faith. We see only the obstacles in our path, and forget that man, working with God, is greater than any obstacle that can oppose itself to his will.

Benjamin Disraeli knew this when he said, “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of man.” He demonstrated its truth in his own life. Alien in race and creed, with other circumstances apparently dead against him at the start, the resolute young Jew overcame all obstacles, and reached the goal of his ideal. He became Prime Minister of England, and was made Earl of Beaconsfield by his sovereign, Queen Victoria. Lowell did not utter a mere airy, poetic idea when he said, The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.

He spoke a simple truth. The poet is always the prophet. He goes ahead of the scientist, and points the way that leads upward to the ideal. Like faith, the poet knows and sees far in advance of the senses. He knows that the vision of our exalted moments is the model given us to make real on the material plane.

The men who have climbed up in the world have seen themselves climbing, have pictured themselves actually in the position they longed to be in. They have climbed up mentally first. They have kept a vision of themselves as ever climbing to higher and higher things. They have continually affirmed their ability to climb, to grow up to their ideal. If we ever hope to make our dreams come true, we must do as they did; we must actually live in the conscious realization of our ideal. This is the entering wedge which will split the difficulties ahead of us, which will open the doors which shut us from our own.

If you are discouraged by repeated failures and disappointments, suffering the pangs of thwarted ambition; if you are not doing the thing you long to do; if life is not yielding the satisfaction, the success and joy of happy service; if your plans do not prosper; if you are hampered by poverty and a narrow, crude, uncongenial environment, there is something wrong—not with the world, or the Creator’s beneficent plans for His children, but with yourself. You are not thinking right. You are not visualizing yourself as you long to be.

We are, every one of us, both ourselves and our environment, true pictures of what we have thought, believed, and done in the past. Every moment of our lives we are experiencing the result of thought. The outward things that have been acting on us, shaping the conditions in which we live, are chiefly the fruits of our own motives, thoughts and acts. What we believe, what we think, what we expect, shapes our lives. Through the control and direction of our thoughts, backed up with corresponding efforts on the physical plane, we can attract to us all our heart’s desires.

How often do we hear it said of some man, “Everything he undertakes succeeds,” or “Everything he touches turns to gold?” Why? Because the man is constantly picturing to himself the success of his undertakings and he is backing up his vision by his efforts. By clinging to his vision, by vigorous resolution and persistent, determined endeavor he is continually making himself a powerful magnet to draw his own to him. Consciously or unconsciously, he is using the divine intelligence or force by the use of which every human being may mold himself and his environment according to the pattern in his mind.

Why don’t you use your divine power to make yourself what you long to be? Why don’t you cling to the vision of yourself which you see in your highest moment, and resolve to make the vision a reality? By persistent right thinking, backed by the steady exercise of your will, you can, if you desire, remake yourself and your environment. Since we can “for one transcendent moment” be the thing we long for, you and I and every human being can make that transcendent or highest moment permanent. It is purely a matter of right thinking. Every time we visualize the thing we long for, every time we see ourselves in imagination in the position we long to fill, we are forming a habit which will tend to make our highest moments permanent, to bring our vision out of the ideal into the actual.

If people only knew the possibilities which center in the highest development of their visualizing powers it would revolutionize their lives. Until comparatively recent times most of the country between Omaha and the Rocky Mountains was a vast barren desert, and it looked as though it would always be absolutely worthless. Many intelligent men wondered why the Creator ever made such a dreary waste as these millions of acres presented, and when it was suggested in Congress that the Government assist in building a railroad across this desert from the Missouri River to the Pacific Slope, even men like Webster laughed at the idea. Webster said that such an undertaking would be a wicked waste of public money, and he suggested the importation of camels for the purpose of carrying the United States mail across the Western desert. He believed this was the only use that could be made of those waste lands.

But the vision seen by the men who conceived the Union Pacific Railroad was no idle dream; it was a foreshadowing of the reality. Before a rail had been laid, these men saw great thriving cities, vast populations and millions of fertile farms springing up like magic where the men without a vision of its possibilities saw nothing but alkali plains, sage brush and coyotes. It was the men who were not limited by appearances, by what the senses told them, who transformed the desert into a thing of beauty and untold wealth.

Human beings are like this arid desert, packed with marvelous possibilities which are just waiting for that which will arouse their latent forces and make the germs of those wonderful possibilities blossom into beauty and power. What we need is a firm belief in the vision of ourselves which we see in the moment of our highest inspiration. As soon as we feel the touch of the awakening, arousing, energizing power of an unalterable faith in our own divinity, in our ability to be “the thing we long for,” our lives will blossom into beauty and grandeur.

The realization of our power to create ideals and to make these live in reality is destined to revolutionize the world, because we build life through our ideals. This power to build mentally is the pathway of achievement, the way which will lead to the millennium. ‘We cannot accomplish anything, do anything, create anything except through an ideal, a vision.

“The vision that you glorify in your mind,” says James Allen, “the ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.

“The thoughtless, the ignorant, and the indolent, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of luck, of fortune and chance. Seeing a man grow rich, they say ‘How lucky he is!’ Observing another become intellectual, they exclaim ‘How highly favored he is!’ And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, they remark, ‘How chance aids him at every turn!’ They do not see the trials and failures and struggles which these men have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience; have no knowledge of the sacrifice they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountable, and realize the vision of their heart.”

The reason why so many people fail to realize their ideals is that they are not willing to do their part to make it real. Remember that the longing, the desire to do a certain thing, is merely sowing the seed of your ambition. If you stop at this you will get about as much harvest as the farmer would get if he put his seed in the ground without preparing the soil, without fertilizing it and keeping the weeds down.

You must back up that which your heart longs to realize with an honest purpose to do your best, a dead-in-earnest effort to make your vision real. The mere holding of the desire to do so, no matter how persistently or strongly you hold it, will not help you to realize your dreams. You must not only sow the seed of desire and longing, but you must do all the nourishing, cultivating, caring for, or you will only reap a thistle harvest. We see men and women everywhere reaping a very thistly, a very weedy harvest from the sowing of mere longings. These people can scarcely get enough out of their harvest to keep them alive, simply because they took no care of their seed after the planting.

The constant nursing, cultivating the desire, the ambition, keeping our heart’s longings and soul yearnings alive, wholesome and healthy by active endeavor, is the only way in which we can match our dreams with their realities.

Watch an immigrant boy who lands in America practically with nothing but the clothes he wears, without knowing our language or customs, and with no friends, no “pull” to advance him, and see how quickly he outdistances many American youths who were born and brought up in the very lap of opportunities. Why? Because this boy constantly thinks and dreams of making his way in the world. He sees himself a successful man, and is forever planning and pushing toward his object.

He begins, perhaps, by selling newspapers in the streets. Then his ambition grows and he dreams of some day having a newsstand. He attends night school in order to get an education. He toils and economizes, flings his enthusiasm and his whole being into his work, is constantly enlarging his mind and also making himself a magnet to attract the thing he longs for. He is obeying the law of attraction, of opulence, and in a little while we see him with a news stand of his own. But he does not stop here. He keeps dreaming, planning, working for something a little larger, and soon he adds books and stationery to his stock in trade. Before long we find him with a large stand in a railway station or in some public place, always saving, and dreaming, planning, thinking success. In a few years more he owns a handsome shop and becomes a real factor in the business world. His whole mental life is poured into that one channel, and of course he is perpetually increasing his magnetic power to attract to himself money and all the other things he desires.

The ambition to become rich is not a lofty one, but the success of this typical immigrant boy illustrates the law of success in every field. For the law is neither moral nor unmoral, the nature of the object concentrated on does not affect its action. It may be the noble vision of a Jeanne d’Arc, of a Savonarola, or of a Lincoln, or it may be a wholly selfish, or an unworthy object, the attractive, constructive forces will build just the same toward the realization of the vision. If a man’s ambition is to own saloons and sell liquor or to be the proprietor of a gambling resort, and he keeps working away on the material as well as the mental plan, he will succeed, just as a man who works in a similar way to become a teacher, or a missionary, succeeds. The same concentration, the same absorption, the same dreaming and thinking and pushing along any other line, law, medicine, engineering, science, farming, whatever it may be, will produce like results. The idea is that the everlasting dreaming and pushing, the alertness to take advantage of opportunity, the constant visualizing of the thing one yearns for most, inevitably bring the desired results. These are the constructive processes, based on the mental vision, which bring us the things we desire.

What we think most about is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our career, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things we most ardently desire.

When the architect looks at the plan of his building he does not see the plan merely. That only suggests the building. It is the invisible building, the creation of his mind he sees. What he takes in from the plan with his eyes is not the reality at all. He sees in all its details the building of his mental vision. If he did not see it in this way, it would never become a reality. If he could see only the mechanical plans he would not be an architect at all.

The framework of your life structure is invisible. It is on the mental plane. You are laying the foundation for your future, fixing its limits by the expectations you are visualizing. You cannot do anything bigger than you plan to do. The mental plans always come first. Your future building will merely be carrying out in detail what you are visualizing today. The future is simply an extension of the present. You are right now by your thought habit, by your prevailing mental attitude, making your place in life. You are locating yourself, settling what you are to be. In other words, you are right now making your future, deciding what your position in the world shall be. And it will be broad, ever growing, ever expanding, or it will become narrower, more pinched and rutty, according to your mental plan, according to the vision you see.

The only world you will ever know anything about, the only world that is true for you at this moment, is the one you create mentally --the world you are conscious of. The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only one you will ever live in.

Whatever you long for you are headed toward, and whatever thought dominates you, or motive is uppermost in your mind, is attracting its affinities. How quickly, for example, a youth who goes from his country home to the city to seek his fortune gravitates toward the things which are uppermost in his mind. He may not know a soul in the city he enters, but in a very short time we find him with his own people, those whose tastes, whose desires and propensities are like his own. He has attracted his affinities.

One boy’s mind is fixed on pleasure, and he gravitates to the saloon, to the dance hall, to the vicious dives, to the gambling table. Another boy’s great desire is self-improvement, and he gravitates to the Y. M. C. A., to some church. We find him in the night schools, in the libraries, or attending lectures, trying ‘to improve his education, to make as broad visioned, as cultured and successful a man as it is possible to make of himself.

The same thing is true of girls. They gravitate toward their desires, their ideals, toward the things on which they have set their hearts. Led by their weaknesses or their strength, they are pulled in the direction on which their thoughts are fixed, whether good or bad.

If ten thousand strangers from other cities were landed in New York today and left to their own devices, they would very quickly be attracted to their affinities. The gambler would find other gamblers, the musician would gravitate to other musicians, the artist would be drawn to art circles; the pure minded, those of high ideals, would soon find others on the same plane, while the impure minded, those with vulgar, low flying ideals, would as quickly find companions like themselves.

A mental magnet cannot attract opposite qualities. It can only attract things like itself, and it is our privilege to give the magnet its quality. We can inject hate into it, jealousy, envy, revenge; we can in a very short time demagnetize the magnet which was pulling good things so that it will attract bad things. It is for us to decide the quality of the magnetic current that shall flow out from us, but the mind is always a magnet sending out and attracting something, and this something which flows back to us always corresponds to the mental outflow.

If we charge it with love, sincerity, genuineness, helpfulness, great spiritual hunger for the good, the beautiful and the true, a longing for a larger and a fuller life, we shall make the mind a powerful magnet to attract the affinities of these qualities. But in an inconceivably short time we can so completely change our mental magnet with thoughts of hatred, spite and bitterness that it will drive away all the good and attract the opposite, strengthening the hatred and bitterness in our souls.

In short, whatever is in the mind at the moment is the thing you are inviting to come and live with you. Your suspicion attracts suspicion. Jealousy brings more jealousy, hate more hate, just as love brings love to meet it, as friendliness brings more friendliness, as sympathy and good will toward all draw the same to you from others and increase your popularity and magnetic power.

We build as we think. Our lives follow our thoughts. As we think so we are. Your personality and your world are limited by the extension of your own thought. You cannot project yourself beyond these self-limitations. Many people limit themselves to such an extent by their gloomy doubts and fears that they utterly dwarf their divine powers and possibilities. They do not believe that their own is coming to them. They are always complaining, visualizing their poverty-stricken conditions, their lack of friends, their lack of sympathy, their lack of love, of opportunity, of social life, of everything desirable. They do not realize that they are their own jailers, that they are holding themselves in the very conditions they despise. They have not learned how to make themselves magnets for the things they desire. They do not know that our own is seeking us and will come to us, whether it is property, friends, love, happiness, or any other legitimate desire, unless we drive it away by our antagonistic thought.

If you did not believe you had the power to walk you couldn’t walk, because you wouldn’t try to. If you don’t believe in your power to get what you want you won’t get it. Until you encourage your longings and believe in your power to realize them they will never be satisfied. You cannot rise out of your present condition until you believe you can. The limit of your thought will be the limit of your possibilities. Your limited ideal of yourself will limit your execution. You will never get any higher than your vision and your faith in that vision.

No one gets very far in this world, or expresses great power, until he catches a glimpse of his higher self—until he feels that the divinity which is stirring within him, and which impels him on the way of his ambition, in the line of his aspiration, is an indication, a prophecy of his ability to reach the ideal which haunts him. The Creator has not put desires in our hearts without giving us the ability and the opportunity for realizing them. There are a thousand proofs in the very formation of our body and brain that we were planned and adapted in every detail of our marvelous structure to achieve grand, glorious things, that we were created and fitted for success and happiness.

No matter how unfortunate your environment, or how unpromising your present condition, if you cling to your vision and keep struggling toward its realization, you are mentally building, enlarging your ideal, increasing the power of your mental magnet to attract your own.

Never mind opposition, never mind criticism, never mind if others call you a fool or a crank—they called the Christ the same—be true to the mysterious message within, the divine voice which bids you up and on. No matter what other things you have to give up, no matter what sacrifices you have to make, let everything else go if necessary, but cling to the ideal which haunts your dreams, for it points to the star of your destiny, and if you follow it you will come out of the darkness into beauty and brightness. Your highest ideal, the vision of your life work which you long to make real, is your best friend. Keep as close to it as you can, stick to it, and it will lead you to your goal. You may not understand why the star has been put so high above you and why so many mountains of obstacles and difficulties intervene, but if you keep your eye on the star and listen to the voice of your soul which bids you climb on, you will reach it.

Many a man has never been able to explain his success, or how he was able to wring it out of such a black background, such iron conditions and seemingly impossible surroundings, as those in which he found himself at the start. But he kept pegging away, never losing sight of his ideal, which became his guiding star, his success angel, which ultimately led him through the dark valleys of difficulty and opposition, up out of the miasma of the stagnant swamps of discouragement to the heights, where the atmosphere is pure, the outlook clear, where excellence dwells. It led him out of the darkness into the light, into freedom, into success.

Just because you are struggling on a farm or in a factory, doing something against which your whole nature rebels, because there is no one to help you support your aged parents or an invalid brother or sister, do not conclude that your vision must perish. Keep pushing on as best you can, and affirming your divine power to attain your desire. Hundreds and thousands of poor boys and girls with poorer opportunities than yours have done immortal deeds because they had faith in their ideal and in their power to attain it.

It is by the perpetual focusing of his thought upon the solving of scientific problems, added to his faith in his ability to solve these problems, that Edison has attracted to himself the forces which have made him the greatest living inventor. His mind has always run ahead of him, visualizing the invention he was trying to bring out into objective reality. He was always picturing himself a little higher up, a little further on, and his success has followed his vision and his faith.

Suppose Edison had lost faith in his vision; suppose he had allowed obstacles to discourage him and had said to himself, “Thousands of men have been thinking along these lines, trying to solve these problems for a long time, and have failed, and how can I expect to succeed? Why should I waste my time and energies in trying to do what they found impossible?”—do you think he would have become the power he is? Of course, he would not,—he couldn’t, any more than Marshal Field could have become a great merchant if he had listened to those who tried to discourage him. Doors always open, opportunities always come, to the man or woman who trusts and works, but nothing comes to the weak, doubting heart, the faint endeavor, nothing comes to those who do not believe in their divinity, their power to overcome.

No matter how black and forbidding the way, just imagine that you are carrying a lantern which always advances with you and gives you light enough for the next step, and although it looks very dark and discouraging a little distance ahead, when you arrive there the light will arrive also. All the light you need is for the next step, to know that you are going in the right direction. In other words, you must have faith, trust. The divine plan that has created us, given us a part in the plan of the great universe, will bring things out better than we could if we will only do our part.

Look back upon your past lives, you self-made men and women, and see how miraculously the doors have opened out of the blackness ahead of you, so that you were able to enter into the Eden of your dream, to accomplish the thing you so long dreamed of!

Goodyear was a dreamer and a seer of visions long before he was able to vulcanize rubber. Morse was a “visionary” or we might not have had the telegraph. Cyrus W. Field had a wonderful vision of an ocean cable, and had he not gone on dreaming of his cable in spite of his disappointments the nations of the world might still be dependent on ships to transmit their messages from one to the other. Had Eli Whitney not been a seer of visions the colored people of the South might still be picking the seeds from cotton by hand. But for the dreams of Marconi’s youth, wireless telegraphy might have been postponed for a century. Had it not been for the dreams and longings of Alexander Graham Bell we might not even yet be talking over the wire. Had Elias Howe not dreamed of a sewing machine women might still be slaves of the needle. Had it not been for Phillips’ and Garrison’s and Lincoln’s dream of freedom, millions of our countrymen might still be in slavery.

All of these people—every inventor, every discoverer, every uplifter of the race, all those who have lifted civilization up from the Hottentots to the Lincolns and the Gladstones, have clung to their vision in spite of incredible sufferings and obstacles. Nothing could turn them from their purpose or shake their faith in their power to make their vision a reality. This was why they won out.

Men succeed in proportion to the fixity of their vision and the invincibility of their purpose. If you can find out a man’s quitting point, the place where he gives up, turns back, you can measure him pretty easily.

The man who conquers is the one who moves, steadily, persistently, everlastingly towards his goal, unmindful whether the goal is always in sight or not, unmindful of obstacles, of difficulties, of discouraging conditions. He moves ever forward, just as Columbus did when he wrote day after day in his log boat, undaunted even when his sailors mutinied, threatening to put him in chains and to throw him overboard: “This day we sailed west because it was our course.” This was his daily record, because there was nothing else for him to do but to sail west. A man with such a mighty purpose as Columbus’s wouldn’t have turned about if his crew threatened murder every day, because he was invincible. Nothing but death could have stopped his onward course.

What could have stopped Farragut from going into Mobile Bay past the enemy’s torpedoes? What could have stayed a man with such a mighty purpose, such invincible determination that he lashed himself to the mast, lest if he was shot or wounded he might fall overboard or be captured in his perilous run past the torpedoes!

Washington showed his invincibility of purpose and fixity of vision at Valley Forge as few men have ever shown it. In fact, this grim courage in face of difficulties, this fixity of vision and inflexibility of purpose have been characteristic of all the great men of history, to whom the world has built monuments.

Science tells us the eagle’s wings developed in response to the eagle’s desire to fly, to soar into the ether. Your longings, your yearnings for something higher and grander, your aspirations, backed by an invincible purpose, will call out your wings, will develop your latent power, so that you will rise above your mediocre environment to the full measure of your possibilities.

If all our youth were taught to keep the soul vision inviolable, never to tamper with that sacred something within which always points heavenward if left alone, that something which, no matter how poor or iron our environment, bids us look up and not down, aspire and not grovel, civilization would advance with marvelous strides towards the millennium.

The limit of your faith in your vision and in yourself is the limit of your achievement. Faith is the greatest magnetic power we know of for the attraction of the things that belong to us.

A great faith, a sublime self-confidence was the magnet which attracted to John Wanamaker that which made him a merchant prince. When young Wanamaker was delivering his first order of clothing in a pushcart in the streets of Philadelphia, he did not keep his mind fastened on his poverty and limitations, and fear he would never get past them. On the contrary, he thought of a great future, and when he went past the big rich stores he pictured himself as a great merchant, and felt confident that the time would come when he would have a bigger and richer store than any of them.

Where self-faith is weak, the will is weak. Most people do not exert their will in overcoming the obstacles in their way, because their resolutions are weak, wishy washy. They are not possessed by their vision, and so they cannot bring to their aid the vigorous determination, the resolute will, the compelling affirmation, that wins out in spite of all opposition. They are not backed by the intense desire to realize their vision that forces one to work and to sacrifice for it.

Desire is at the bottom of every achievement. It has ever been the great molding, shaping force in civilization. Desire is prayer. Our prayer is behind and at the bottom of all our achievements.

Desire is behind all progress. Civilization rests upon it. Our cities are the representations of the desires of those who built them. Every railroad train is a bundle of desires, of inventors’ discoveries, of mechanics’ desires. Our homes are manifested desires. Our libraries are made up of multitudes of desires of the authors who wrote the books. Our schools, our colleges, our universities are nothing but desires fulfilled, objectified dreams of those who have built them. Every institution rests upon desires. Our lives, our homes, our friends, are all manifested desires.

All great achievements, great discoveries and inventions began in longings and desires. The success of every poor boy and girl who have pushed to the front began in longing, in indefinite yearnings, which they had the faith and the courage to nurse and back up until they realized their dreams. There is a great difference between the yearnings of the body, the workings of bodily desires and passions, and the yearnings and longings of the soul. The soul longings are really the God urge in us, the expressions of the divinity within, of the cosmic intelligence. They open the windows of the mind and give us a glimpse of the realities that were prepared for us at the foundation of the world. They are not empty imaginings, but the substance of hoped-for things, the realities of unseen things, the precursors of the things themselves.

We are apt to think that what we do in the world, our life work, is purely a personal choice. But there is something inside of us, if we are honest and earnest, that is leading us toward our own, the thing we were made to do. The youth answers an advertisement, “Boy Wanted,” and gets a place which does not at all fit him, but the divine urge within haunts him until he changes. Again and again he may be a round peg in a square hole, but this inner urge—call it ambition, aspiration, a divine leading, what you will—keeps at him until he find his own, the place that fits him.

We cannot believe that Abraham Lincoln found the White House by accident or by following a selfish personal ambition. No, he was led by the Spirit to the great work for which he was born, and for which all his previous experience had been molding him.

And this same divine urge which led Lincoln out of the forest to the White House is active in every human being. There is a divine messenger detailed at every birth to follow the individual through life. This divine messenger acts as guide, is always pointing out the right road and cautioning against the wrong. If we follow the divine promptings, we shall come to our own. The poor boys who have shaped American history never dreamed when they left the farm in the backwoods, or the little village in which they were born, that they were destined to do great things. They simply followed their instinctive leadings without thinking much about, or really recognizing, their divine origin.

The mysterious unrest in the great within of us, which is ever urging us on, is an expression of the divine principle inherent in every atom, in every electron in the universe; it is the God urge which is lifting everything up to a higher and ever higher plane. Everything in the universe is on the way to its highest possible expression, on the way to perfection, on the way to its God.

We are here to do our part in raising mankind to a higher plane by giving expression to our highest ideal, by doing the best we are capable of doing. In St. John we read: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” Most people do not seem to think that they came into the world for any special purpose or that they are under any obligation to bear witness to the truth. They do not seem to realize that they are bound to deliver the message entrusted to them at birth, to realize the vision shown them in their highest moment. Many act as if they were sent here to catch and grab everything they can get hold of for themselves; that they are under no special obligation to anybody but their own families. In other words, few people realize that they came into the world with any particular purpose other than to gratify their own desires, to reap the harvest that others have sown without rendering anything in return.

They regard the world upon which the open their eyes as a legitimate field, a sort of hunting ground for their own personal gratification, where they are welcome to whatever they can bag without cost to themselves. They have no appreciation whatever of the fact that billions of people who have lived in all the past have really been preparing the world for them; that they are the heirs of all who have gone before them, and that they are in honor bound to do their share in contributing to the inheritance of those who shall come after them. We of today have inherited the results of other people’s efforts. We are enjoying all the inventions, all the discoveries, all the luxuries that are the fruits of the struggles and trials, the sufferings, poverty and hardship of the inventors, the discoverers, the achievers who labored to improve the conditions of mankind. We were sent here to carry their work a step farther by bringing into the actual the vision of our divinest inspiration.

The way to do this is to follow our inspiration, what our soul longs to do. You are always gravitating toward the vision you hold in mind. You will never make headway in any other direction than toward your dominant thought, your dominant desire, and your dominant motive. Visualization will sometime be found to be one of the great secrets of character building and achievement. Effort follows visualization as achievement follows effort. Jesus achieved His Christ-hood. It was not thrust upon Him. He achieved it just as we must achieve our ideal if we ever attain it. The Savior was not born a Christ. This was a result of His efforts and His work to realize His vision.

Nor did Christ hold up any inexplicable ideal for His followers when he said, “Ye too are sons of God.” This had never been said before. But again and again the Savior assured His followers that the things which He had done, and even greater things, those who came after Him would do.

All through His teaching Christ assured men of their divinity. When He said, “I and my father are one,” He did not refer to the fact of His own superiority, to the fact that He was more divine than others. He was always trying to convince His disciples that they could do what He did, that they were as divine as He was, and that the reason they did not perform what seemed to them miracles was their lack of faith in their divinity.

We rise with our vision. All elevation, all progress, is first mental. It is based on faith in a visualized ideal. Everything starts with a vision, and the result always corresponds to the nature of the vision and our faithfulness to it. Buddha became what he did because he gravitated towards his vision. George Washington concentrated upon a vision of liberty and a grand democracy which would be a model for the whole world, and he never ceased to struggle until the vision became a reality. Andrew Carnegie became the great iron master because he gravitated towards his vision; because of his struggles to realize that dominant vision. John Wanamaker is what he is because he concentrated upon his vision, by always reaching out toward it, always striving to match with reality his dream of a mammoth business.

Every man becomes like his ideal, realizes the vision which dominates his life, and towards which he constantly struggles.

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