Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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 would be and will be the “prayer of faith;” and the “prayer of faith” shall save the sick, that is, faith in the power of a certain quality of thought-element to bring strength, and repair a worn or racked or strained body, and in real though unseen element build it up again. That is the power of God, or the infinite spirit of good, working in and through us to cure ourselves and others; and this power is eventually to be accumulated by all of us in this or some other existence, so that it shall always keep our bodies in good repair, free from pain, and fuller and fuller of life and vigor. It will make our minds as healthy as our bodies, and as free from hopelessness, gloom, dejection, or discouragement, or any other form of mental disease; and this ultimate result is implied in the saying that “God shall wipe all tears from all eyes.”
The world is steadily growing to this result, and medical science makes less and less use of drugs as compared with the past, for man is wiser than he realizes himself, and is always growing more and more away from an entire dependence on the material, and leans more and more unconsciously on the unseen or spiritual, elements of Nature. Many a physician of to-day, bright, hopeful, cheerful, and determined in mind, owes his successful practice quite as much to the current of strong, hopeful, cheerful, vigorous thought he sends the sick man or woman, as he does to the medicines he gives them.
There are two kinds of doctors. One nurses the maladies of the patient, the other nurses the patient’s body; one keeps the malady alive, the other makes the body alive; one keeps the malady in the body, the other sends it out of the body. Both doctors work their spiritual gift on the patient, but in very different ways and with different results.
That is a spiritual power or gift, which, when you have formed a plan or purpose in your mind, causes you to hold to it and not be led, swayed, influenced, cajoled, tempted, jeered, or ridiculed out of it by others. If you have resolved to be something, in art or business, greater and higher than you now seem to others, it will keep you to that resolve. The man or woman who succeeds must always in mind or imagination live, move, think, and act as if they had gained that success, or they never will gain it. Genuine kings or queens in the empire of mind will think as highly of themselves, and value themselves as much, when compelled temporarily to take what the world calls an humble place, as if upon their thrones. Those about them feeling this thought of self-appreciation will always pay them the respect due them. Such kings and queens will always by force of their spiritual gift gravitate to whatever station at or near the top they belong. They will do this through the silent force of mind, or the quiet mood of resolve firmly held to, more than by any use of the body. The body is to be used only when the spiritual force or clear-sight sees the right thing, the right time, and the right place, in which or on which to use it, even as the carpenter uses his saw when he has measured and decided what to cut with it. If he sawed boards indiscriminately, he would “cut every thing to waste” and build nothing, and that is what thousands of people do with their bodies. They put its force on little things, fret over little things; and when their industry for a whole morning has swept every atom of dust out of the room corners, scoured the bottoms of all the tin pans, fretted an hour because the letter he expected didn’t come, passed another hour over a desk full of papers to find another letter which amounts to nothing, what has he or she accomplished save to fritter away their force or spiritual power for nothing?
You must be what most you live in thought, since it is your thought that draws its material correspondence to you. If in mind you abase yourself before another’s talent, or their grander style of living, or are over-awed by their pretentiousness into a sort of envious humility, or into that sinful self-depreciation which is ever saying, “I can never stand there,” you place the greatest of barriers to standing there. Look always on the best things the world can give as if they were yours,—not the houses, carriages, and finer clothes of others as yours, but others like unto them when you earn them; and earn them and have them you can, if you have sufficient faith in the spiritual law or mental condition of mind which brings these things, and is the only force which really ever brings them to any one.
It is not wrong to own and enjoy the best things of this earth. It is a necessity and a benefit that all your finer tastes should have what they demand. But there are just methods and unjust methods of getting the goods of earth. In other words, there are wise methods and unwise methods of getting what we need. Injustice is but another word for ignorance, or lack of wisdom. You will not walk off a precipice in broad daylight; you are very likely to walk off one in the dark. Neither will you commit any act, when you see more and more clearly it is going to harm you, or be unprofitable in some way.
It is no benefit, but an injury to you, to live in a hovel, or wear seedy clothes, or eat inferior food, or be compelled to live among coarse and vulgar people. The Christ never preached that it was a duty to live poorly. He did preach going without purse or scrip, and selling goods and giving to the poor; and in the very doing of this, he was inferring that perfect faith in the cultivation of that state of mind or order of thought which would bring all things as they were needed. He did in substance say, “Seek ye first to put your mind, so far as you may, in the line of correspondence and rapport with God, or the infinite force of good; and when you do this, there will come to you your share, and an ever-increasing one, of spiritual power, which will bring you house and lands.” And I see no reason why there should not be included houses and carriages and vestments, and all that can best please eye or ear, or any of the senses. Splendor does not degrade. If it did, it would injure us to look on a gorgeous sunset. If you are one with God, or with the infinite and never to be comprehended power which governs endless universe, you are then in the line of the highest spiritual power. You cannot then be a pauper in any sense, no more than God is a pauper. And this infinite power, when diligently sought, gives “good gifts” to those who seek; and “good gifts” are neither mouldy bread, nor mouldy clothes, nor rotten houses.
Prophecy is a spiritual gift, and many more people have the gift of prophecy than realize it themselves. Your spirit, your higher self, has the power of giving you impressions as to proper methods of doing business. It sometimes warns you on your first meeting with people, that there is in them some defect of character which you need to be on guard against. You find if you despise this, your own self-prophesying, and are governed entirely by the counsel or the fear of others, that you are oppressed or kept down, and have neither that freedom nor independence of life you would have, and will have, when you learn to trust your own intuition, your internal teacher, the only reliable teacher you will ever have in this or any other existence, because that teacher is your own share and part and relationship with God, or the infinite power of good; and the more it is cultivated, the clearer will you see, and the more will it do for you. And when men or women believe in themselves, and have learned to trust to their own power to do any thing, and, while accepting helps from others, regard always the helps as secondary