“A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought, ‘HadIasword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears,—but this blunt thing—!’
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.”

Where will you be at 65? Five men in six at the age of 65 are living on charity. Just one in twenty is able to live without working at 65.

That is what the American Bankers Association found when it took one hundred healthy men at 25 and traced them to 65.

These hundred were healthy to start with. They all had the same chance for success. The difference lay in the way they used their MINDS. Ninety-five out of one hundred just do the tasks that are set them. They have no faith in themselves—no initiative—none of the courage that starts things. They are always directed or controlled by someone else.

At 65, where will you be? Dependent or independent? Struggling for a living—accepting charity from someone else—or at the top of the heap?

“I am the Master of my fate.”

Until you have learned that, you will never attain life’s full success. Your fate is in your own hands. You have the making of it. What you are going to be six months or a year from now depends upon what you think today.

So make your choice now:

Are you going to bow down to matter as the only power? Are you going to look upon your environment as something that has been wished upon you and for which you are in no way responsible?

Or are you going to try to realize in your daily life that matter is merely an aggregation of protons and electrons subject entirely to the control of Mind, that your environment, your success, your happiness are all of your own making, and that if you are not satisfied with conditions as they are, you have but to visualize them as you would have them be in order to change them?

The former is the easier way right now—the easy way that leads to the hell of poverty and fear and old age.

But the latter is the way that brings you to your Heart’s Desire.

And merely because this Power of Universal Mind is invisible, is that any reason to doubt it? The greatest powers of Nature are invisible. Love is invisible, but what greater power is there in life? Joy is invisible, happiness, peace, contentment. The radio is invisible—yet you hear it. It is a product of the law governing sound waves. Law is invisible, yet you see the manifestation of different laws every day. To run a locomotive, you study the law of applying power, and you apply that law when you make the locomotive go.

These things are not the result of invention. The law has existed from the beginning. It merely waited for man to learn how to apply it. If man had known how to call upon Universal Mind to the right extent, he could have applied the law of sound waves, the law of steam, ages ago. Invention is merely a revelation and an unfoldment of Universal Wisdom.

That same Universal Wisdom knows millions of other laws of which man has not even a glimmering. You can call upon It. You can use that Wisdom as your own. By thinking of things as they might be instead of as they are, you will eventually find some great Need. And to find a need is the first step towards finding the supply to satisfy that need. You’ve got to know what you are after before you can send the Genie-of-your-Mind a-seeking of it in Universal Mind.

THE ACRE OF DIAMONDS

You remember the story of the poor Boer farmer who struggled for years to glean a livelihood out of his rocky soil, only to give it up in despair and go off to seek his fortune elsewhere. Years later, coming back to his old farm, he found it swarming with machinery and life—more wealth being dug out of it every day than he had ever dreamed existed. It was the great Kimberley Diamond Mine!

Most of us are like that poor Boer farmer. We struggle along under our surface power, never dreaming of the giant power that could be ours if we would but dig a little deeper—rouse that great Inner Self who can give us more even than any acre of diamonds.

As Orison Swett Marden put it:

“The majority of failures in life are simply the victims of their mental defeats. Their conviction that they cannot succeed as others do robs them of that vigor and determination which self-confidence imparts, and they don’t even half try to succeed.

“There is no philosophy by which a man can do a thing when he thinks he can’t. The reason why millions of men are plodding along in mediocrity today, many of them barely making a living, when they have the ability to do something infinitely bigger, is because they lack confidence in themselves. They don’t believe they can do the bigger thing that would lift them out of their rut of mediocrity and poverty; they are not winners mentally.

“The way always opens for the determined soul, the man of faith and courage.

“It is the victorious mental attitude, the consciousness of power, the sense of mastership, that does the big things in this world. If you haven’t this attitude, if you lack self-confidence, begin now to cultivate it.

“A highly magnetized piece of steel will attract and lift a piece of unmagnetized steel ten times its own weight. De-magnetize that same piece of steel and it will be powerless to attract or lift even a feather’s weight.

“Now, my friends, there is the same difference between the man who is highly magnetized by a sublime faith in himself, and the man who is de-magnetized by his lack of faith, his doubts, his fears, that there is between the magnetized and the de-magnetized pieces of steel. If two men of equal ability, one magnetized by a divine self-confidence, the other de-magnetized by fear and doubt, are given similar tasks, one will succeed and the other will fail. The self-confidence of the one multiplies his powers a hundredfold; the lack of it subtracts a hundredfold from the power of the other.”

Have you ever thought how much of your time is spent in choosing what you shall do, which task you will try, which way you shall go? Every day is a day of decision. We are constantly at crossroads, in our business dealings, our social relations, in our homes, there is always the necessity of a choice. How important then that we have faith in ourselves and in that Infinite intelligence within. “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.” “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

In this ever-changing material age, with seemingly complex forces all about us, we sometimes cry out that we are driven by force of circumstances. Yet the fact remains that we do those things which we choose to do. For even though we may not wish to go a certain way, we allow ourselves to pursue it because it offers the least resistance.

“To every man there openeth
A way, and ways, and a way.
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low:
And in between, on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.”

—JOHN OXENHAM

Now, how about you? Are you taking active control of your own thought? Are you imaging upon your subconcious mind only such things as you want to see realized? Are you thinking healthy thoughts, happy thoughts, successful thoughts?

The difference between the successful man and the unsuccessful one is not so much a matter of training or equipment. It is not a question of opportunity or luck. It is just in the way they each of them look at things.

The successful man sees an opportunity, seizes upon it, and moves upward another rung on the ladder of success. It never occurs to him that he may fail. He sees only the opportunity, he visions what he can do with it, and all the forces within and without him combine to help him win.

The unsuccessful man sees the same opportunity, he wishes that he could take advantage of it, but he is fearful that his ability or his money or his credit may not be equal to the task. He is like a timid bather, putting in one foot and then drawing it swiftly back again—and while he hesitates some bolder spirit dashes in and beats him to the goal.

Nearly every man can look back—and not so far back either with most of us—and say, “If I had taken that chance, I would be much better off now.”

You will never need to say it again, once you realize that the future is entirely within your own control. It is not subject to the whims of fortune or the capriciousness of luck. There is but one Universal Mind and that mind contains naught but good. In it are no images of Evil. From it comes no lack of supply. Its ideas are as numberless as the grains of sand on the seashore. And those ideas comprise all wealth, all power, all happiness.

You have only to image vividly enough on your subconscious mind the thing you wish, to draw from Universal Mind the necessary ideas to bring it into being. You have only to keep in mind the experiences you wish to meet, in order to control your own future.

When Frank A. Vanderlip, former President of the National City Bank, was a struggling youngster, he asked a successful friend what one thing he would urge a young man to do who was anxious to make his way in the world. “Look as though you have already succeeded,” his friend told him. Shakespeare expresses the same thought in another way—“Assume a virtue if you have it not.” Look the part. Dress the part. Act the part. Be successful in your own thought first. It won’t be long before you will be successful before the world as well.

David V. Bush, in his book “Applied Psychology and Scientific Living,” says:

“Man is like the wireless operator. Man is subject to miscellaneous wrong thought currents if his mind is not in tune with the Infinite, or if he is not keyed up to higher vibrations than those of negation.

“A man who thinks courageous thoughts sends these courageous thought waves through the universal ether until they lodge in the consciousness of someone who is tuned to the same courageous key. Think a strong thought, a courageous thought, a prosperity thought, and these thoughts will be received by someone who is strong, courageous and prosperous.

“It is just as easy to think in terms of abundance as to think in terms of poverty. If we think poverty thoughts we become the sending and receiving stations for poverty thoughts. We send out a ‘poverty’ mental wireless and it reaches the consciousness of some poverty-stricken ‘receiver.’ We get what we think.

“It is just as easy to think in terms of abundance, opulence and prosperity as it is to think in terms of lack, limitation and poverty.

“If a man will raise his rate of vibration by faith currents or hope currents, these vibrations go through the Universal Mind and lodge in the consciousness of people who are keyed to the same tune. Whatever you think is sometime, somewhere, received by a person who is tuned to your thought key.

“If a man is out of work and he thinks thoughts of success, prosperity, harmony, position and growth, just as surely as his thoughts are things—as Shakespeare says—someone will receive his vibrations of success, prosperity, harmony, position and growth.

“If we are going to be timid, selfish, penurious and picayunish in our thinking, these thought waves which we have started in the universal ether will go forth until they come to a mental receiving station of the same caliber. ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ and minds of like thinking are attracted one to the other.

“If you need money, all you have to do is to send up your vibrations to a strong, courageous receiving station, and someone who can meet your needs will be attracted to you or you to him.”

When you learn that you are entitled to win—in any right undertaking in which you may be engaged—you will win. When you learn that you have a right to a legitimate dominion over your own affairs, you will have dominion over them. The promise is that we can do all things through the Mind that was in Christ.

Universal Mind plays no favorites. No one human being has any more power than any other. It is simply that few of us use the power that is in our hands. The great men of the world are in no wise SUPER Beings. They are ordinary creatures like you and me, who have stumbled upon the way of drawing upon their subconscious mind—and through it upon the Universal Mind. Speaking of Henry Ford’s phenomenal success, his friend Thomas A. Edison said of him—“He draws upon his subconscious mind.”

The secret of being what you have it in you to be is simply this: Decide now what it is you want of life, exactly what you wish your future to be. Plan it out in detail. Vision it from start to finish. See yourself as you are now, doing those things you have always wanted to do. Make them REAL in your mind’s eye—feel them, live them, believe them, especially at the moment of going to sleep, when it is easiest to reach your subconscious mind—and you will soon be seeing them in real life.

It matters not whether you are young or old, rich or poor. The time to begin is NOW. It is never too late. Remember those lines of Appleton’s:¹⁰

“I knew his face the moment that he passed
Triumphant in the thoughtless, cruel throng—
I gently touched his arm—he smiled at me—
He was the Man that Once I Meant to Be!

“Where I had failed, he’d won from life, Success;
Where I had stumbled, with sure feet he stood;
Alike—yet unalike—we faced the world,
And through the stress he found that life was good.
And I ? The bitter wormwood in the glass,

The shadowed way along which failures pass!
Yet as I saw him thus, joy came to me—
He was the Man that Once I Meant to Be!

“We did not speak. But in his sapient eyes
I saw the spirit that had urged him on,
The courage that had held him through the fight
Had once been mine. I thought, ‘Can it be gone?’
He felt that unasked question—felt it so
His pale lips formed the one-word answer, ‘No!’

“Too late to win? No! Not too late for me—
He is the Man that Still I Mean to Be!”