The Prosperity Bible

I was a farmer’s wife and held up my end of the work without flinching; but we lost money each year, and the place was mortgaged and finally sold for debt. Perhaps there never was a more favorable situation for me than when I stood out on the roadside, after years of toil on that farm, with all my possessions in a valise, waiting for a wagon to come along that would carry me to town, five miles away. I did not suspect its being a favorable situation then. I had not a cent of money and no visible prospects ahead. It was strange that I had mustered sufficient courage to make the move I was then making. I was going to San Francisco, some ninety miles away (I lived in the mountainous region of Lake County, California). I was not only going there but I intended to find work more congenial than the work I had been doing so unceasingly for twenty years and more.

I cannot tell how I dared undertake such a trip, except that it was an unconscious obedience to the law of aspiration. I knew almost nothing about a city, and what little I did know made me still more timid concerning it. But I was so tired of life on the plane I had been living that I voluntarily closed the door on it forever, even if starvation were the result.

As I look back now I can see how for years I had been gradually coming out of the crushed feeling that rendered me so helpless, as far as facing the world was concerned. And yet the world was a great terror to me even then; my heart sank whenever I thought of being among the happy, busy, independent, prosperous people of the city; they seemed so fortunate and so easy in their minds; they had homes and plenty. Truly I was Hagar in the desert: an outcast.

And yet I would go on. I had not then become aware of the strength that now wells up every moment in my breast and makes me laugh at discouragements. It was no doubt there and held me to my purpose, in spite of my not seeing it. It was entirely undeveloped so far as my consciousness was concerned, but it had begun to grow within me, and even this small prophecy of its coming power held me to my purpose. It proved to be a great triumph to me that I dared to go, under the circumstances, and it marked a turning point in my life from the weakness that comes from self depreciation to the power that results from a high individual valuation.

When I reached the nearest village, which was Lower Lake, five miles from our mountain ranch, a place where every one knew me, I tried to borrow ten dollars to pay my traveling expenses to San Francisco. I asked one friend and another only to be refused; some of them did not have the money; others who could have obliged me were afraid to do so. The people were all poor except a few merchants, and, as we were in debt to them, I did not dare apply for a loan. I ran over the streets of that wretched little town until nine o’clock that night, then I bethought myself of the one hope left me. The village shoemaker had his shop and dwelling house under the same roof. From the street I saw a light in their rooms, and I rapped at the door. Both the man and his wife were startled; I presume that I was awfully pale, and I know that I was more resolute than I had ever been in my life before. I believe to this day that I frightened those people out of that ten dollars. I told them that I had asked dozens of people who professed friendship for me to let me have it and every one refused. “You,” I said, “are the last hope I have, and it is a good hope, for I know you are going to lend it to me. I am leaving home for the city where I shall find something besides a slave’s work and I shall pay you back very soon.”

I did not say much more than this; the man shambled off to another room and came back with the money. He died of softening of the brain some two years later—I hope my night attack on his coffers was not the means of bringing it on. I would not like to be responsible for the death of one who did me a kindness.

But truly there was something strange about it. If I had thought of him at all in the morning, when I started in my quest for money, I should have put him down as the one most unlikely to let me have it. No, I am sure that he did not let me have it; I took it by mental force. Until I paid him, several weeks later, the circumstance scarcely left my mind an hour.

The next morning I was on the stage under full sail for the city. Oh, the glory of the thing! The exhilaration of that ride over the mountains; the splendor of the sunshine; the beauty of the trees and flowers; the gorges so far below the road, and the streams of crystal water cascading through them! I had been over the same road several times before, but never in the same frame of mind. There had been an awakening in my brain which brought out beauties in the air and sky and water never previously noted; it was evident that I was more alive than usual. It was the beginning of my becoming acquainted with myself.

I had never sought strength in myself; I had sought it in religion, in the advice of other persons, in books that were supposed to do good to those who read them; such means of grace profited me nothing. In fact, the more I depended on them the weaker and more irresolute I became.

But at last I was conscious of a small amount of resolution, even though the possession of it filled me with anxiety. I kept asking myself how I dared leave home, where I had food and clothes at least, to venture out into the wilderness of the world’s ways without either money or friends. At first the answer seemed clear enough; it was to the effect that I had been measuring myself with other people and had reached the conclusion that I was as clear-headed as any body else and that, therefore, my chances of making a living outside of the drudgery of farm work were good.

As I neared the city, having spent seven out of my ten dollars, I began to sink in my own estimation, and as I did so my chances of success shrank too. Now note the correlation of thought and external things, as expressed in the situation just described. Thought, when positive, is all compelling; but, when negative, it has no power, either on the body or on external things. My thoughts weakened as the day waned; so when night came and I shudderingly walked the brilliant streets of the gay city, I was the most utterly hopeless creature that ever faced such a dismal situation.

I went to a lodging house where I paid one dollar for a room, and had less than two dollars left. The next morning I began to search for a room to live in. I found one in the cock-loft of a house kept by two old sisters, and a brother. It was a decent room and I became very happy in it later on. I paid one dollar and fifty-cents in advance for it and had almost nothing left. Up to this time I had bought nothing to eat. There were some crackers and remnants of a lunch in my satchel, put up in Lower Lake by a kind neighbor with whom I had spent the night, and these lasted a day or two. Then I went without anything for three full days.

All this time I was haunting the newspaper offices; I wanted some literary work to do. I had no special reason for believing myself fitted by nature or education for this kind of work, but all my aspirations had pointed toward literature from my babyhood, and now I could not consent to do any other kind of work. Matters really came to a life-and-death contest before I found a place where I could earn a living with my pen, but I clung to the hope and would be appeased by nothing else.

I had wealthy relatives in the city but I kept away from them. I read the “wants” in the papers when a paper chanced to fall in my way, and I knew that I could get a situation and large wages as either cook or housekeeper in some of the exceedingly wealthy families there. I knew the perplexities many of these families underwent because they could get no competent help. I knew of a woman who had taken a situation in one of these families and was paid two hundred dollars per month. I knew, also, that this woman was not my equal in such a capacity, and that I could easily obtain such work and such wages; but I would not have it.

I was certainly putting a very low valuation on my food in those days. I had never been hungry before, and really was not hungry then, or at least I was not conscious of being so. “I have had bread and butter all my life,” I said to myself, “and bread and butter alone do not count for much just now. Unless my bread and butter can be made to feed a higher life than one occasioned by the drudgery I have done these twenty years, I do not want them. I cannot starve too soon.”

I wanted what I wanted and I did not want anything else. I must have answered my own query as did the darkey, when asked where he was going: “Whar’s I gwine? I’s gwine whar I’s gwine; dat’s whar I’s gwine.” At last I found a little newspaper that was worrying out a precarious existence by carrying many patent medicine advertisements, and here the editor gave me work at six dollars a week. I asked him for a dollar in advance, and only obtained it when I told him I had been three days without food. I worked for him faithfully; wrote for the paper—a four-page weekly—and really secured a circulation of five or six hundred subscribers for it. It had no regular subscribers when I commenced work upon it; nothing but a home manufactured list, kept up for the purpose of deceiving the postal authorities.

I was surprised to find that the catastrophe did not overwhelm me. I was not nearly so frightened as I had been when I made my first move toward freedom. “Something else will come,” I said, and I said it because I was beginning to feel within myself the power to command that something.

I was constantly growing more confident in myself—not in my luck, not in special providence or the overruling power of God; but in my own individual self. I was daring to think better of myself. I had formerly considered myself weak and others strong. I now looked upon myself as being stronger than I had ever imagined before. And there was not one particle of increase in my belief in self that did not record itself in the external conditions of my life. The more I believed I could do, the more I accomplished.

I remember one morning, on wakening, it flashed through my brain that I was really a genius. The suggestion startled me. I was frightened for a moment. Then I sat up in bed and said to myself: I am not going to refuse the suggestion; it has come unbidden, but it is mine. As I continued to think I saw that everyone was a genius. That is, everybody had the power to develop out of himself, just as the leaves develop out of a tree, anything he wished to bring forth. The magnitude of the thought startled me; and yet I knew it was true then, quite as well as I know it now, after the confirmation of many years. That morning I had indeed taken a splendid step.

But to return to my personal affairs. I really had less anxiety in my new life than ever before. I need not tell how, little by little, I saved the money to bring my children to me —it is told somewhere else in my printed works. But I must tell, even though I may have told it before, how the spirit of self confidence that had lain dormant in me so long, at last assumed proportions that made me question whether I wanted any position in any man’s office any longer. Why could not I do something for myself? By this time two or three years had passed. I had learned to write a good article, and was making a reputation, which, though not extensive, was very valuable to me, since it procured for me a situation on a large Chicago paper where I had light work and excellent pay for a year or more.

But this spirit of independence, which is self growth, grew stronger in me all the time, as I trusted more and more the voice of the Law of Aspiration, or desire, and followed where it led. I was tired of being somebody’s hired man, and longed to try my powers at work of my own. It used occasionally to happen that one of my editorials was condemned. This caused me to ask myself what right had the proprietor of the paper, or anybody else, to have my brain in his own power. He might well have in his own power the brains of those who do not object to such ownership, but with me it was different. My self-esteem had grown until I thought I could do as good work as the proprietor, or anybody else.

In other words, the thing you believe you can do, you can do; and if you will only be true to your belief, there is no power that can hinder you. The reason most men do not accomplish more is because they do not attempt more. But how are you to believe in your own power? You will have to affirm or declare a certain amount of faith in yourself, whether it is there or not; and then put that faith to the test by carrying it out in some external condition. Begin this way in small things and see them increase under your effort until you really do begin to feel the pride of self-conscious strength and individual mastery.

One dislikes to recount a circumstance that has already been written and published in some previous work, and I would not do what I am going to do were it not so necessary to the illustration of the subject in hand. The same thing has already appeared in one of my books called “A Search for Freedom.”

The study of self develops the lifting power in a man; it shows him his own strength, and seeing his own strength he reaches out and takes without any fear of refusal, just what he wants. Excepting himself, there is no one to say “No” to him. But this reaching out to take possession of what he wants is no simple thought affair that loses itself in a succeeding troop of useless thoughts; it is thought armed with intelligent purpose and equipped for effort in the field of activities.

There are plenty of visionary guides to wealth nowadays, in which the writers tell you how, by holding certain thoughts, you can sit and do nothing while riches flow to you. There is nothing practical in this at this time, though the time may come when thought will have such power. But now the utmost that thought can do in this matter is to fill the person with vitality by showing him of what great things he is capable. It has been said, “Genius is only energy intensified, and energy is thought intensified and expressed in action.” Thought shows a man that he does not have to be poor; that he does not have to ram stones in the street, or hammer iron, or dig ore, or drive horses for a living. It shows him, moreover, that there is no compulsion on him to work in grooves that are distasteful to him. Why? Because he sees that his own mind is fertile, and can hatch out ideas that will expand and grow, if he will only give them proper attention. He sees that he himself is as capable of arousing new hopes in the race and adding new uses to the operations of labor, as any other man.

But in order to accomplish anything he must think. Thought is the beginning of effort. The person who works for others, and plods steadily in a rut, has no need for thought. His boss thinks for him, and, if this goes on long enough, all the grand possibilities of his brain shrivel up and die because of non-use.

Capital needs and demands intelligent labor—men who think for themselves. Thought—original, creative thought—will bring its reward by increased remuneration as you work for others while growing to strength sufficient to enable you to work for yourself, thus making room for some one not yet quite so strong as yourself.

The slaves of capital are where they are, not because capital oppresses them, but because they will not use their brains. Employers everywhere honor the growing employee. No worthy man of money would hinder the growing mentality of the ambitious employee, but he could not if he would. Thought has power to redeem anyone by showing him a true estimate of his own worth. But so long as the so-called slaves of labor will not think, they can scarcely be called men. They are on a lower plane than that of men, and they are receiving treatment in conformity with the plane they are on. They have only their own ignorance to blame, and this is the thing they never think of blaming.

I repeat, knowledge of self is the lifting power; it individualizes. No man can seek a knowledge of himself introspectively without discovering the rudiments of mighty effort within himself, as I did. It is this discovery that lifts one in the scale of being, until he looks with level eyes into the eyes of all other men. When he is able to do this his fetters, no matter what they may have been, actually fall. Better positions in business open up to him; better surroundings come about him in answer to his increased consciousness of power. Let a man once proclaim himself a free man from his high point of intellectual seeing, and all the world hastens to respond.

In first looking abroad over the world, and seeing the inequality of position among the masses, we naturally resent it, and begin to search for some person or persons on whom we may lay the blame. In California where the capitalist fourished in extraordinary glory and where his tyranny was more felt than in any other state—owing to the fact that the mass of the laborers were the sons of the bravest men that the republic ever produced; namely, the pioneers who cut their way through such enormous obstacles to reach the land of gold in ‘49—there was the loudest possible call for sympathy and assistance from one so situated as I had been.

I believed that certain social and political reforms were all that were necessary to enable men and women to rise in the scale of being, to much higher positions of thought and action than they had yet attained. And so I worked for the accomplishment of this end. That is, I did my little best for it. I was not widely known as a writer, and my influence was small; but I was in earnest and put my whole soul into the work, believing in it with great fervency.

But at every step I was disappointed. The people themselves, for whom I was laboring, were the greatest disappointment of all. They were dead to any sense of power within themselves, and were only alive to what they considered their wrongs. No thoughts of a higher intellectual growth stimulated them in their efforts to obtain greater financial independence. Their ideas of liberty, if gratified, would lead in the direction of unbridled license. They knew nothing of freedom in the true sense of the word. They had no idea that their fetters were of their own making no less than of their masters’, and were all to be resolved into one short sentence—complete ignorance of their own undeveloped possibilities. They would not institute within themselves the search for what they needed in order to secure liberty. They did not know, and seemingly did not wish to know, that each man holds his own heaven in his personality, and that the careful unfolding of that personality will yield him all that he can ever desire. They preferred the clashing of opinions that were not based upon the foundation where individual growth begins; but, instead, were the mixed outcome of life’s mistaken beliefs.

Instead of growing nearer to these people in sympathy I was growing away from them. At first I did not see the drift of the thing and made many futile attempts to regain my interest. I grew to hate the writing of a reform article. As to reading one from any of the numerous exchanges I simply could not do it. I was on the wrong track and intuition told me so, even in advance of reason.

It would be difficult for me to describe the confusion of mind I now fell into. My duties in the office of the paper on which I worked, though light, became a nightmare. The proprietor, the owner of the whole concern, was generosity itself. He was, and is, one of the noblest men I have ever met; my fast friend then and now; and if every soul on earth should prove a disappointment, the remembrance of him, his splendid manhood, his loyalty to his highest convictions of truth, and indeed his whole mentality, would always stand before me in justification of my unshaken faith in the godhood of man.

I am conscious now that this beloved friend was also losing faith in the reform for which he was laboring so faithfully; but at the time I left the paper I did not know it. He was still putting every effort of his strong, great life into his work, regardless of the fact that those for whom he thought and labored, and sacrificed, were so irresponsive and un-thankful. He left the paper later, and has since applied his fine business ability to building up another enterprise, which has been wonderfully successful.

But when I left his paper he was displeased. He had a right to think me ungrateful. My action must have looked so to him. But I could not remain in the work. It is true that I was incapable of analyzing the impulse which prompted me to abandon it. I only recognized the impulse, and, because it was in the line of my growth, I was obedient to it.

I had made many a little conquest over my beliefs in my own weakness, and I was strong for a woman who had begun her career in such a state of morbid self-depreciation. I had developed rapidly from the condition of fear that had once been normal, and was standing at what seemed the open doorway of my own character; where, looking within, I saw many plants of great promise and vigor and wanted a chance to water them and dig about their roots, so that, in time, I should have much honest pride and comfort in them.

I had come to think my work degrading to the higher possibilities of my brain, and although those possibilities were too vague to be clearly defined, they were apparent enough to hold every secret thought of my mind true to them; so I was almost recklessly obedient to the ideal constantly beckoning me forward.