Thoughts I Met on the Highway | Page 6

hence of courage, who is the
master of circumstances, and who make his or her power felt in the world. It is the man or
the woman who lacks faith and who as a consequence is weakened and crippled by fears
and forebodings, who is the creature of all passing occurences.
What one lives in his invisible thought world he is continually actualizing in his visible
material world. If he would have any conditions different in the latter he must make the
necessary change in the former. A clear realization of this great fact would bring success
to thousands of men and women who all about us are now in the depths of despair. It
would bring health, abounding health and strength to thousands now diseased and
suffering. It would bring peace and joy to thousands now unhappy and ill at ease.

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face
Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny--
The waters know their own, and draw
The brooks that spring in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
_John Burroughs_

The thing that pays, and that makes for a well balanced, useful, and happy life, is not
necessarily and is not generally a somber, pious morality, or any standard of life that
keeps us from a free, happy, spontaneous use and enjoyment of all normal and healthy
faculties, functions, and powers, the enjoyment of all innocent pleasures--use, but not
abuse, enjoyment, but enjoyment through self-mastery and not through license or
perverted use, for it can never come that way. Look where we will, in or out and around
us, we will find that it is the middle ground--neither poverty nor excessive riches, good
wholesome use without license, a turning into the bye-ways along the main road where
innocent and healthy God-sent and God-intended pleasures and enjoyments are to be
found; but never getting far enough away to lose sight of the road itself. The middle
ground it is that the wise man or woman plants foot upon.

For evil poisons; malice shafts
Like boomerangs return,
Inflicting wounds that will
not heal
While rage and anger burn.

Tell me how much one loves and I will tell you how much he has seen of God. Tell me
how much he loves and I will tell you how much he lives with God. Tell me how much

he loves and I will tell you how far into the Kingdom of Heaven,--the kingdom of
harmony, he has entered, for "love is the fulfilling of the law."
And in a sense love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that
move the world. Live only in the thought of love for all and you will draw love to you
from all. Live in the thought of malice or hatred, and malice and hatred will come back to
you.
And so love inspires love; hatred breeds hatred. Love and good will stimulate and build
up the body; hatred and malice corrode and tear it down. Love is a savor of life unto life;
hatred is a savor of death unto death.
"There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,
There are souls that are pure and true;

Then give to the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.
"Give love, and love to _your_ heart will flow,
A strength in your utmost need;
Have
faith, and a score of hearts will show
Their faith in _your_ word and deed."

The kind of a man for you and me!
He faces the world unflinchingly,
And smiles as
long as the world exists,
With a knuckled faith and force like fists:
He lives the life he
is preaching of,
And loves where most is the need of love;
And feeling still, with a
grief half glad,
That the bad are as good as the good are bad,
He strikes straight out
for the right--and he
Is the kind of a man for you and me!
_James Whitcomb Riley_

After a certain age is reached in any life, the prevailing tone and condition of that life is
the resultant of the mental habits of that life. If one have mental equipment sufficient to
find and to make use of the Science of Thought in its application to scientific mind and
body building, habit and character building, there is little by way of heredity,
environment, attainment of which he or she will not be the