Fundamentals of Prosperity | Page 7

he was supporting scholarships in four universities to enable young
men to study the raw materials which he is using in his plant. I asked
him if he was supporting any scholarships to study the human element
in his plant, and he said "No." Yet when asked for definite figures, it
appeared that eighty per cent. of every dollar which he spends, goes for
labour, and only twenty per cent. goes for materials. He is endowing
four scholarships to study the twenty per cent. and is not doing a thing
to study the eighty per cent.! Statistics show that the greatest
undeveloped resources in America are not our mines or our forests or
our streams, but rather the human souls of the men and women who

work for us.
This is most significant when one resorts to statistics and learns that
everything that we have,--every improvement, every railroad, every
ship, every building costing in excess of $5,000, every manufacturing
concern employing over twenty men, yes, every newspaper and book
worth while, has originated and been developed in the minds of less
than two per cent. of the people. The solution of our industrial
problems and the reduction of the cost of living depend not on fighting
over what is already produced, but upon producing more. This means
that this two per cent. must be increased to four per cent., and then to
six per cent. If all the good things which we now have, come from the
enterprise of only two per cent., it is evident that we would all have
three times as much if the two per cent were increased to six per cent.
Jesus was absolutely right in His contention that if we would seek first
the Kingdom of God and His righteousness all these other things would
naturally come to us. This is what Jesus had in mind when He urged
people to give and serve, promising that such giving and serving should
be returned to them a hundred fold or more. Jesus never preached
unselfishness or talked sacrifice as such, but only urged His hearers to
look through to the end, see what the final result would be and do what
would be best for them in the long run. Jesus urged His followers to
consider the spiritual things rather than the material, and the eternal
things rather than the temporal; but not in the spirit of sacrifice. The
only sacrifice which Jesus asked of His people was the same sacrifice
which the farmer makes when he throws his seed into the soil.
The story of the loaves and fishes is still taught as a miracle, but the
day will come when it will not be considered such. The same is true
regarding the incident when Jesus found that His disciples had been
fishing all night without results and He suggested that they cast the net
on the other side. They followed His advice and the net immediately
filled with so many fishes that they could hardly pull it up. If we to-day
would give more thought to the spiritual and less to the material, we
would have more in health, happiness, and prosperity. The business
men to-day would be far better off if--like the fishermen of Galilee--we

would take Jesus' advice and cast our net on "the other side."
We are told that with sufficient faith we could remove mountains. Have
mountains ever been removed or tunnelled without faith? The bridging
of rivers, the building of railroads, the launching of steamships, and the
creation of all industries are dependent on the faith of somebody. Too
much credit is given both to capital and labour in the current
discussions of to-day. The real credit for most of the things which we
have is due to some human soul which supplied the faith that was the
mainspring of every enterprise. Furthermore in most instances this
human soul owes this germ of faith to some little country church with a
white steeple and old-fashioned furnishings.
The reason I say "old-fashioned" church is because our fathers were
more willing to rely upon the power of faith than many of us to-day.
What they lacked in many other ways was more than compensated by
their faith in God. They got, through faith, "that something" which men
to-day are trying to get through every other means. All the educators,
all the psychologists, all the inspirational writers cannot put into a man
the vision and the will to do things which are gained by a clear faith.
Most of us to-day are frantically trying to invent a machine which will
solve our problems, when all the while we have the machine within us,
if we will only set it going. That machine is the human soul.
The great problem to-day is to develop