As A Man Thinketh

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The outer world of circumstance shapes itself to the inner world of

th ought, and both pleasant and unpleasant external conditions are

factors which make for the ultimte good of the individual. As the

reaper of his own harvest, man learns both by suffering and bliss.

 

Following the inmost desires, aspirations, thoughts, by which he

allows himself to be domintaed, (pursuing the will-o-the wisps of

impure imaginings or steadfastly walking the highway of strong and

high endeavour), a man at last arrives at their fruition and

fulfilment in the outer conditions of his life. The laws of growth

and adjustment every where obtain.

 

A man does not come to the pothouse or the goal by the tyranny of

fate or circumstance, but by the pathway of grovelling thoughts and

base desires. Nor does a pure-minded man fall sudenly into crime by

stress of any mere external force; the criminal thought had long been

secretly fostered in the heart, and the hour of opportunity revealed

its gathered power. Circumstance does n ot make the man; it reveals

him to himself. No such conditions can exist as descending into vice

and its attendant sufferings apart from vicious inclinations, or

ascending into virtue and its pure happiness without the continued

cultivation of virtuous aspirations; and man, therefore, as the lord

and master of thought, is the maker of himself, the shaper and author

of environment. Even at birth the soul comes to its own, and through

every step of its earthly pilgrimage it attracats those combinations

of conditions which reveal itself, which are the reflections of its

own purity and impurity, its strength and weakness.

 

Contd....