we allow our various forms
of selfishness to positively govern us is, first in bewailing a
weakness seriously, but constantly looking at it and weeping over it,
and in that way suggesting it over and over to our brains so that we
are really hypnotizing ourselves with the fault and enforcing its
expression when we think we are in the effort to conquer it. Such is
our negative attitude.

Now if we are convinced that evil in ourselves has no power unless we
give it power, that is the first step toward making our efforts
positive and so negativing the evil. If we are convinced that evil in
ourselves has not only no power but no importance unless we give it
power, that is a step still farther in advance. The next step is to
refuse to submit to it and refuse to resist it. That means a positive
yielding away from it and a positive attention to doing our work as
well as we can do it, whatever that work may be.

There is one way in which people suffer intensely through being
negative and allowing their temptations to be positive, and that is in
the question of inherited evil. "How can I ever amount to anything with
such inheritances? If you could see my father and what he is, and know
that I am his daughter, you would easily appreciate why I have no hope
for myself," said a young woman, and she was perfectly sincere in
believing that because of her inherited temptations her life must be
worthless. It took time and gentle, intelligent reasoning to convince
her that not only are no inherited forms of selfishness ours unless by
indulging we make them ours, but that, through knowing our
inheritances, we are forewarned and forearmed, and the strength we gain
from positive effort to free ourselves fully compensates us for what we
have suffered in oppression from them. Such is the loving kindness of
our Creator.

This woman of whom I am writing awoke to the true meaning of the story
of the man who asked, before he went with the Lord Jesus Christ, first
to go back and bury his father. The Lord answered, "Let the dead bury
their dead, and come thou and follow me." When we feel that we must be
bound down by our inheritances, we are surely not letting the dead bury
their dead.

And so let us study the whole question more carefully and learn the
necessity of letting all that is sickness and all that is evil be
negative to us and our efforts to conquer it be positive; in that way
the illness and the evil become less than negative,--they