What is the greatest evil in the world today? What causes more misery, more sin, than all other vices combined? What is the worst enemy of morality and peace and happiness that mankind knows?
POVERTY!
Poverty is responsible for most commercialized vice. Poverty fills our prisons with thieves and murderers. Poverty causes most disease. Poverty is back of nine-tenths of the unhappiness and misery in the world. It drives men to drink and to suicide, women to that and more. It makes people do things that otherwise they would look upon with loathing. Poverty is a vice. It is true that some of the churches still catalog it among the virtues, but that is a relic of the old feudal days when the few had all the riches and the many were left to wallow in misery. To keep the masses from revolution, it was necessary to teach them that God ordered it thus that there was not enough of the good things of life to go around, so that the many must suffer here that the few might enjoy, but it would all be made right in the next world.
We know now that this was mere “pap” to keep the masses quiet. We know that if, as the Master said, a tree is known by its fruit, poverty is as bad as the deadly upas tree of Java, which kills even the birds with its poisonous exhalations. We know that, for every individual to whom poverty has acted as a goad to high achievement, a thousand others have spent lives of squalor and misery. We know that the old idea that there was not enough to go around was just as foolish as that God would pick a particular class of “nobility” and give them everything good while letting the common people starve.
There are more riches in this old earth than mankind can ever exhaust. There is more power in the atom alone than man can ever use. There are unlimited resources of food and riches and comfort as yet undreamed of by man.
Why then do so many live in squalor, even in this richest country in the world? Why do millions die of famine in India and China? For the same reason that a party of explorers, driven by a west wind from the Amazon River far out to sea, and drifting in a river of fresh water, they almost perished of thirst! In much the same way, millions of human beings, living in a world of plenty, perish of want.
God is not partial to a fortunate few. He does not give to them and let the rest starve. He gives freely to all!
But there are certain laws governing these riches of His. There are rules that must be complied with. And until you learn the rules, you are like Ali Baba without the magic “Open, Sesame!” to open the doors of the treasure trove.
You have heard of Einstein’s “Law of Relativity.” And you probably wondered at times why such a to-do should be made over an obscure scientific law that could have no bearing, as far as you could see, upon everyday life.
But do you know that Einstein’s theory is as important to you as any law in the land? For on what is his theory based?
1st, that there is only one material in the Universe.
2nd, and this is the part with a direct bearing upon you . . that there is only one fundamental Law of the Universe. That law is the Law of Attraction.
Perhaps you will get the connection more readily if I give you this law as it is expressed in the Bible. There it reads “To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
To put it in ordinary, everyday language Einstein’s Law of the Universe and the Biblical precept both mean that you must either be an Attracter, drawing things to you, or else be willing to sit back and see everything that is yours attracted to some stronger personality. Does that seem unjust? If so, it is still the way that all of Nature works.
Take any seed of plant life. Take an acorn, for instance. You put it in the ground . . plant it. What happens? It first gives of all the elements it has within itself to put forth a shoot, which in turn shall draw from the sun and the air the elements that they have to give; and at the same time, it puts out roots to draw from the earth the moisture and other elements it needs for growth. Its top reaches upward to the sun and air, its roots burrow deeply into the ground for moisture and nourishment. Always it is reaching out. Always it is creating a vacuum, using up all the materials it has on hand, drawing to itself from all about every element it needs for growth.
Time passes. The oak tree stops growing. What happens? In that moment, its attractive power ceases. Can it then live on the elements it has drawn to itself and made a part of itself through all those years? No, indeed! The moment growth stops, disintegration starts. Its component elements begin to feel the pull of the growing plants around them. First the moisture drains out of the tree. Then the leaves fall, the bark peels off . . finally the great trunk crashes down, to decay and form soil to nourish the growing plants around. Soon of the noble oak, nothing is left but the enriched soil and the well-nourished plants that have sprung from it.
The Fundamental Law of the Universe is that you must integrate or disintegrate. You must grow . . or feed others who are growing. There is no standing still. You must speed up your rate of motion until you are attracting to yourself all the unused forces about you, or you must give your own to help build some other man’s success.
“To him that hath, shall be given.” To him that is using his attractive powers, shall be given everything he needs for growth and fruition. “From him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The penalty for not using your attractive powers is the loss of them. You are demagnetized. And like a dead magnet surrounded by live ones, you must be content to see everything you have drawn to yourself taken by them, until eventually even you are absorbed by their resistless force.
That is the first and fundamental Law of the Universe. But how are you to become an Attracter? How are you to make your start? In the same way that it has been done from the beginning of time.
Go back to the first law of life. Go back to the beginning of things. You find Nature logical in all that she does. If you want to understand how she works, study her in her simplest, most elementary forms. The principle established there hold good throughout the universe. The methods there used are used by all created things, from the simplest to the most complicated.
How, for instance, did the earliest forms of cell life, either plant or animal, get their food? By absorbing it from the waters around them. How does every cell in your body, every cell in plant or tree or animal, get its food today? In exactly the same way by absorbing it from the lymph or water surrounding it! Nature’s methods do not change. She is logical in everything. She may build more complicated organisms, she may go in for immense size or strange combinations, but she uses the same principles throughout all of life.
Now, what is Nature’s principle of Increase? From the beginning of time, it has been . .
The Money Bible
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