Part 3

Mental and spiritual power must be gained by degrees.

If you attained maturity before you entered this field of "New Thought" it is folly to suppose a complete transformation of your whole being will take place in a week--a month--or a year.

All you can reasonably look for is a gradual improvement, just as you might do if you were attempting to take up music or a science.

The New Thought is a science, the Science of Right Thinking. But the brain cells which have been shaped by the old thoughts of despondency and fear, cannot all at once be reformed.

It will be a case of "Try, try again."

Make your daily assertions, "I am love, health, wisdom, cheerfulness, power for good, prosperity, success, usefulness, opulence."

Never fail to assert these things at least twice a day; twenty times is better. But if you do not attain to all immediately, if your life does not at once exemplify your words, let it not discourage you.

The saying of the words is the watering of the seeds.

After a time they will begin to sprout, after a longer time to cover the barren earth with grain, after a still longer time to yield a harvest.

If you have been accustomed to feeling prejudices and dislikes easily, you will not all at once find it easy to illustrate your assertion, "I am love." If you have indulged yourself in thoughts of disease, the old aches and pains will intrude even while you say "I am health!"

If you have groveled in fear and a belief that you were born to poverty and failure, courage and success and opulence will be of slow growth. Yet they will grow and materialize, as surely as you insist and persist.

Declare they are yours, right in the face of the worst disasters. There is nothing so confuses and flustrates misfortune as to stare it down with hopeful unflinching eyes.

If you waken some morning in the depths of despondency and gloom, do not say to yourself:

"I may as well give up this effort to adopt the New Thought--I have made a failure of it evidently----." Instead sit down quietly, and assert calmly that you are cheerfulness, hope, courage, faith and success.

Realize that your despondency is only temporary; an old habit, which is reasserting itself, but over which you will gradually gain the ascendency. Then go forth into the world and busy yourself in some useful occupation, and before you know it is on the way, hope will creep into your heart, and the gray cloud will lift from your mind. Physical pains will loosen their hold, and conditions of poverty will change to prosperity.

Your mind is your own to educate and direct.

You can do it by the aid of the Spirit, but you must be satisfied to work slowly.

Be patient and persistent.

Old Clothes

As you go over your wardrobe in the spring or fall, do not keep any old, useless, or even questionable, garments, for "fear you might need them another year."

Give them to the ragman, or send them to the county or city poor house. There is nothing that will keep you in a rut of shabbiness more than clinging to old clothes.

It is useless to say that you cannot afford new garments.

It is because you have harped upon this idea that you are still in straitened circumstances.

You believe neither in God or yourself.

Possibly you were brought up to think yourself a mere worm of earth, born to poverty and sorrow.

If you were, it will of course require a continued effort to train your mind to the new thought, the thought of your divine inheritance of all God's vast universe of wealth.

But you can do it.

Begin by giving away your old clothes. There may be people, poor relations, or some struggling mother of half-clad children, to whom your old garments will seem like new raiment, and to whom they will bring hope and happiness.