easily into the dominant temper of
our time and seems to reconcile that serving of two masters, God and
Getting On, which a lonely teacher long ago thought quite impossible.

Naturally such a movement has a great following of disciples who
doubtless "have their reward." So alluring a gospel is sure to have its
own border-land prophets and one only has to study the advertisements in
the more generally read magazines to see to what an extent all sorts of
short-cuts to success of every sort are being offered, and how generally
all these advertisements lock up upon two or three principles which
revolve around self-assertion as a center and getting-on as a creed. It
would be idle to underestimate the influence of all this or, indeed, to
cry down the usefulness of it. There is doubtless a tonic quality in
these applications of New Thought principles of which despondent,
hesitating and wrongly self-conscious people stand greatly in need.

_The Limitations and Dangers of Its Positions_

But there is very great danger in it all of minimizing the difficulties
which really lie in the way of the successful conduct of life,
difficulties which are not eliminated because they are denied. And there
is above all the very great danger of making far too little of that
patient and laborious discipline which is the only sound foundation upon
which real power can possibly be established. There is everywhere here
an invitation to the superficial and, above all, there is everywhere
here a tendency toward the creation of a type of character by no means
so admirable in the actual outcome of it as it seems to be in the
glowing pages of these prophets of success. Self-assertion is after all
a very debatable creed, for self-assertion is all too likely to bring us
into rather violent collisions with the self-assertions of others and to
give us, after all, a world of egoists whose egotism is none the less
mischievous, though it wear the garment of sunny cheerfulness and
proclaim an unconquerable optimism.

But at any rate New Thought, in one form or another, has penetrated
deeply the whole fabric of the modern outlook upon life. A just
appraisal of it is not easy and requires a careful analysis and
balancing of tendencies and forces. We recognize at once an immense
divergence from our inherited forms of religious faith. New Thought is
an interweaving of such psychological tendencies as we have already
traced with the implications and analogies o