lowed after the real
life instead of giving all time and attention to the mere external, men
who lived in the higher stories of their being, and not continually in
the basements.

With here and there an exception we reverse the process. We live in the
valleys, so to speak, often disease-infected valleys, when we might
mount up to the mountain-tops, and there dwell continually in the warm
and mellow sunlight of God's, or if you please, of nature's great,
unchangeable laws, and find ourselves rising ever higher and higher, and
revelations coming new every day.

The Master never claimed for himself anything that he did not claim for
all mankind; but, quite to the contrary, he said and continually
repeated, Not only shall ye do these things, but greater than these
shall ye do; for I have pointed out to you the way,--meaning, though
strange as it evidently seems to many, _exactly_ what he said.

Of the vital power of thought and the interior forces in moulding
conditions, and more, of the supremacy of thought over all conditions,
the world has scarcely the faintest grasp, not to say even idea, as yet.
The fact that thoughts are forces, and that through them _we have
creative power_, is one of the most vital facts of the universe, the
most vital fact of man's being. And through this instrumentality we have
in our grasp and as our rightful heritage, the power of making life and
all its manifold conditions exactly what we will.

Through our thought-forces we have creative power, not in a figurative
sense, but in reality. Everything in the material universe about us had
its origin first in spirit, in thought, and from this it took its form.
The very world in which we live, with all its manifold wonders and
sublime manifestations, is the result of the energies of the divine
intelligence or mind,--God, or whatever term it comes convenient for
each one to use. And God said, Let there be, and there was,--the
material world, at least the material manifestation of it, literally
spoken into existence, the spoken word, however, but the outward
manifestation of the interior forces of the Supreme Intelligence.

Every castle the world has ever seen was first an ideal in the
architect's mind. Every statue was first an ideal in the sculptor's
mind. Every piece of mechanism the world has ever known was first
formed in the mind of the inventor. Here it was given birth to. These
same mind-forces then dictated to and sent the energy into th