Your own highest
invisible friends can and will aid you in your endeavor to be yourself. They can and will throw chances in your
way, in whatever field of effort you wish to work. They cannot work for you in this way, so long as you are to‑day
absorbing the thought of some inferior mind, and acting it out, and perhaps to‑morrow
the thought of another and acting that out.
If you want a ship built for you, you don’t give it in
charge of a ship‑builder to‑day, and the builder of a scow to‑morrow. Yet such,
as to effect, is the condition of many impressional minds. Ignorantly taking in, or ruled by the thought of others, they are
building after one plan to‑day, and another one to‑morrow.
You cannot speak out an unwelcome opinion in a circle of
friends, so long as you fear such speaking will cost you a friend. So long as
you have such a fear (and it be the time and place to speak that truth), and
you are prevented by such fear from speaking it, so long are you under the rule of that friend’s mind. You value a
friendship more than a truth. You barter
a truth for the good‑will of a person. Then you are no longer free or
independent. Unconsciously, perhaps, that person is then ruling you. Yet, so ruling you, he neither respects nor
values you so much for being under his dominion. There is in human nature an
inherent love and respect for whatever is free.
Fear cripples the
spirit, and diseases the body. Fear is everywhere,—fear of want, fear of
starvation, fear of public opinion, fear of private opinion, fear that what we
own to‑day may not be ours to‑morrow, fear of sickness, fear of death. Fear has become with millions a fixed
habit. The thought is everywhere. The thought is thrown on us from every
direction. Fear makes the tyrant. It makes the merciless master the
inexorable creditor. “I fear,” says the man of millions, “that unless I exact
my rents or dues, that I can no longer enjoy the mania for heaping up millions,
which do me no good but the thought of
owning them.”—“I fear,” says his agent, “that unless I obey my master’s
rigid orders, and collect his rents and dues, that I cannot live.” Because the agent has the rich man’s fear thrown on
him. He absorbs that thought from him. He thinks the fear in and of the
rich man’s brain. The agent must collect rent of the editor or the minister. He
hands to them the fear he has caught of the rich man. They take the infection. “I cannot print this truth,” says the
editor. “I cannot preach that,” says ‘the minister, “because readers and
hearers would leave, and then where would be the money to pay our rents?” This
thought of fear and actual unseen substance, as real as any other element in
nature, in this way dribbles and drains from the rich man’s mind, way down
to the miserable tenant in garret or cellar. It ends with the thief. “I fear,”
he says, “starvation also.” He puts his hand directly in his neighbor’s pocket,
and pulls out a sixpence.
There is no difference, save in method, between his act and
that of the ruling spirit.
“I fear,” says some one commencing to learn an art, “the
criticism of others on my imperfect methods in that art. I fear their ridicule.” Then you are ruled by them. You will never
advance so fast as when you do not care for what they say. It is most
desirable, then, to get rid of fear. It is the actual source of poverty of
wealth, and poverty of health. To live
in continual dread, continual cringing, continual fear of any thing, be it loss
of love, loss of money, loss of position or situation, is to take the readiest
means to lose what we fear we shall.
Does it help you pay a debt, to fear the creditor when there
is no money in your purse? Does it help you make a living, to be ever in fear
of want? Does it help you to health, to fear disease? No. It weakens in every way.
How shall we get rid of fear, and the rule over us of other
minds crippled by fear? Attack in mind
whatever you fear. Commence by seeing yourself in mind as brave. See yourself,
in what you call imagination, as calmly defying whatever you fear, be it a
man or a woman, be it a debt or a dreaded possibility. What so you figure to yourself in your mind is a reality. Such thinking
will give you strength. Demand for yourself more courage. Ask for it. Pray
for it, and the quality of courage will come to you more and more, and what so
comes can never be lost.
Prentice Mulford,
Your Forces and How
to Use Them
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