ity builds, the same as those
environment erects, when the awakened interior forces are considered,
are as mud walls standing within the range of a Krupp gun: shattered and
crumbled they are when the tremendous force is applied.

Thought needs direction to be effective, and upon this effective results
depend as much as upon the force itself. This brings us to the will.
Will is not as is so often thought, a force in itself; will is the
directing power. Thought is the force. Will gives direction. Thought
scattered gives the weak, the uncertain, the vacillating, the aspiring,
but the never-doing, the I-would-like-to, but the get-no-where, the
attain-to-nothing man or woman. Thought steadily directed by the will,
gives the strong, the firm, the never-yielding, the never-know-defeat
man or woman, the man or woman who uses the very difficulties and
hindrances that would dishearten the ordinary person, as stones with
which he paves a way over which he triumphantly walks, who, by the very
force he carries with him, so neutralizes and transmutes the very
obstacles that would bar his way that they fall before him, and in turn
aid him on his way; the man or woman who, like the eagle, uses the very
contrary wind that would thwart his flight, that would turn him and
carry him in the opposite direction, as the very agency upon which he
mounts and mounts and mounts, until actually lost to the human eye, and
which, in addition to thus aiding him, brings to him an ever fuller
realization of his own powers, or in other words, an ever greater power.

It is this that gives the man or the woman who in storm or in sunny
weather, rides over every obstacle, throws before him every barrier,
and, as Browning has said, finally "arrives." Take, for example, the
successful business man,--for it is all one, the law is the same in all
cases,--the man who started with nothing except his own interior
equipments. He has made up his mind to _one_ thing,--success. This is
his ideal. He thinks success, he sees success. He refuses to see
anything else. He expects success: he thus attracts it to him, his
thought-forces continually attract to him every agency that makes for
success. He has set up the current, so that every wind that blows
brings him success. He doesn't expect failure, and so he doesn't invite
it. He has no time, no energies, to waste in fears or forebodings. He is
dauntless, untiring, in his efforts. Let disaster come to-day, and
to-morrow--